Early Petitions Research Articles

Legal Pluralism in Colonial Lagos: The 1894 Petition of the Lagos Muslims to their British Colonial Masters

AbstractThis paper is about metropolitan Lagos—under the British only a "township", though long Nigeria's capital. From early in its history the percentage of Muslims living in Lagos has been high, somewhere around fifty percent. There is a long history of attempts by activists among the Lagos Muslims, none yet successful, to persuade the authorities pro tem to establish Sharia Courts for the use of Muslims, to which they could take their civil matters for adjudication under Islamic law. After briefly introducing Lagos, we describe one of these attempts: the 1894 petition of the Lagos Muslims to their British colonial masters, and its outcome, paying particular attention to the pluralistic legal environment in which it was made. This early petition—or rather the facts that it was made, and that it failed, all context having been forgotten—lives on in the thinking of many Nigerian Muslims today as another example of British hostility to Islam, often held to be responsible for the failure of Islamic law to thrive in the predominantly Yoruba southwest of which Lagos is a part. This paper is an attempt to restore the context, and thus perhaps to help improve the analysis of the fate of Islamic law in Nigeria's southwest.

Church, state and law: solutions to lay contumacy in the Anglo-Scottish borders during the later thirteenth century

This article considers jurisdictional conflict between church and state in the thirteenth century through the case of Roger, rector of Whitfield, a cleric abducted from his Tynedale cure. Considering this incident and Roger's attempts to gain redress it examines the jurisdictional tensions within the liberty of Tynedale, the resultant failure of the process of signification of excommunication and the use of the private petition. A close examination of the diplomatic of this early petition demonstrates both that it was drawn up under the influence of ecclesiastical administration and that this administration made tacit acknowledgement of the importance of royal grace in the exercise of secular authority to enforce ecclesiastical law. The petition is included as an Appendix.

Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates

Women claimed their right to petition Congress on national issues long before they won the right to vote. They first petitioned elected representatives only on personal or local matters, but in 1830, women petitioned Congress against Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act and continued thereafter to petition Congress on other national issues, especially against slavery. Catharine Beecher organized the 1830 women's petition movement against Indian removal, an effort applauded by some and stridently condemned by others. In The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia (1907), Georgia representative and removal proponent Wilson Lumpkin castigated antiremovalists such as Beecher as “Northern fanatics” who had “gotten up thousands of petitions, signed by more than a million, of men, women, and children” (p. 47). Since piles of petitions sent to Congress were destroyed and even reportedly burned for fuel, we are left with estimates such as Lumpkin's to help us gauge early petition campaigns—and he may have exaggerated to emphasize the opposition he faced in his removal efforts.

Petitions in the Early English Parliaments

It has long escaped the notice of historians that "Petitions" had much importance in the early history of English Parliament. W. Stubbs and his followers, looking from their traditional point of view of "the political assembly: of the Three Estates", treated "taxation" as the most important driving force of parliamentary history and counted petitions as naught. It owes the laborious work of Mr. H. G. Richardson and Professor.G. O. Sayles that petitions have gained a certain attention among the historians.Richardson and Sayles produced an entirely new picture of the early parliaments, questioning, or even denying, the traditional picture of the political "representative" parliament of England. But they went too far to give a modest and. acceptable picture, by disavowing all the parts of the traditional theory both in function and in construction of parliament. The shortcomings of their theory now need to be re-considered and be corrected.The author of this short article wants to make some arguments on this subject by considering such excellent but each isolated works on early petitions together, as the works of Richardson and Sayles, J: G. Edwards, H. L. Gray, A. F. Pollard, A. D. Mayers and D. Rayner. Thus arranging the ideas about early petitions and then re-considering them in the light of the printed rolls and documents, the author anticipates to show one more aspect of the changing phase of parliamentary function and construction than that she has already produced in another article.The main points of this article are twofold. 1) The FUNCTION of early petitions: The earliest petitions had both judicial and executive or administrative charactors. In time, as the judicial charactor became, lost from the records of petitions on the parliament rolls, the executive or administrative records of petitions broke into two kinds, one called the "private" petitions, and the other the "common" petitions. Then even the "private" petitions faded away from the parliament rolls, and the "common" petitions became the only kind of the petitions on the rolls, . growing more and more legislative in charactor. 2) The PROCEDURE of early petitions: Keeping pace with these changes and developments of functions the procedure of petitions differentiated. There developed beside the older process of "private" petitions a new one of the "com-mon" petitions. But this could not mean that, as Richardson and Sayles thought, the former lost its real function in favour of the latter. The development of parliamentary offices in and after the late 14th century seems to show that those functional changes of petitions were, at least from one aspect, rather surface, and were only the results of differentiation of the system of record-making. Of course these differentiation is very important because this in turn suggests the emergence of certain differentiation of ideas of justice, legislation and administration. But the functioning body of parliament as a whole seemes still accumurative and attractive, rather the center of the whole government than some entirely re-constructed two Houses of political charactor.The change and development of the function of early parliamentary petitions coincides with the change and development of the function of early parliaments as a whole, that is, from judicial to legislative. But this change and development was a very slow process, and through this process parliaments still kept and even developed to be the center of the whole government.

Three Early Petitions of the Commonalty

Three Early Petitions of the Commonalty