Book Review

The Eleventh British Legal History Conference was held at the University of Exeter in July 1993. This collection of papers focuses on a selection of those which cover the history of law reporting in Britain from its origins to the twentieth century. While the collection has been designed "to cover at least one aspect of each of the principal areas of the subject," due to the "diverse legal journals" in which such writings have been published (p. vii), the result is mixed. Lacking an introduction, bibliography, and index, none of which would have been difficult to put together, the volume will have less use than it might have otherwise.	1
There are several useful essays which supply important lacunae in the field. Paul Brand surveys "The Beginnings of English Law Reporting" (1-14) for 1268-90. Assessing over three hundred law reports from thirty-nine manuscript collections, Brand notes how distinctive these are from the contemporary Casus and the Brevia. Representing a variety of purposes, some of them were used to teach law and others for attorneys' litigation practice. John Baker assesses "Some Early Newgate Reports (1315-28)" (35-53). While it is unclear as to how many cases were reported, Baker argues convincingly that these represent a regular series at Newgate from which an early criminal jurisprudence might be written. Some miscellaneous examples suggest that there was little information on factual details, the technicalities of pleading, or trials or juries. But the reports reveal increasing restrictions placed on benefit of clergy and the role of the Ordinary of Newgate.	2
Perhaps the most stimulating paper of the whole volume is that of David Seipp, whose "Crime in the Year Books" (154-84) will transform most readers' understanding of criminal law in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The history of the criminal law has never received its due from the "common law" side of legal historical writing, which has long argued that there was no real criminal law until the rise of defense counsel in modern times. Seipp, in a masterful analysis of 810 reports on criminal proceedings 1300-1500, reveals that 5 percent of such case reports had lawyers who pleaded or argued on behalf of criminal defendants (the same percentage as in reports of trespass or debt). Relating as well the entertainment and news value contained in these reports, most of which were on appeal, Seipp provides evidence of the development of a concept of intent, of accessories not required to answer until the principals were convicted, and of damages given for defendants acquitted. This is just the kind of research that will make legal history relevant to both the "internal" and "external" approaches of the profession.	3
The core of the volume addresses the reports of the early modern era. David Ibbetson's "Law Reporting in the 1590s" (74-88) contains a brilliant interpretation of the relationship between the early modern reports, plea rolls, and law students in the context of the older, printed legal literature. Sifting through some two hundred volumes of case reports, Ibbetson reveals how judges played to the gallery, senior counsel put cases to the judges, and legal doctrine was recorded. While these reports would sometimes cite plea roll references, there is no evidence that they were used later by their compilers for legal practice. Most of these reports cited the older printed treatises and Year Books and almost never used contemporary or near-contemporary cases. Thus Ibbetson argues that these manuscript reports were compiled largely for self-instruction until official reporters were created by the 1630s to produce more reliable case reports that were given judicial imprimatur.	4
Hamilton Bryson presents a comprehensive analysis of "Law Reports in England from 1603 to 1660" (113-22). Noting that there were few printed law reports of contemporary cases in this era, he observes that printers preferred to publish, apart from Coke and Hobart, the old treatises and Year Books. Hence the flood of printed reports for the period after 1648, most of poor quality, and the bibliographic nightmare posed by copyists of the manuscript reports. Bryson closes with a plea to the Selden Society to publish critical editions of the modern manuscript reports, as the "Dark Ages" of this era coined by John Baker, its current literary director, at the first legal history conference in 1972, is still quite dark. The common law reports of early modern England are brought to a fitting close by James Oldham's "Detecting Non-Fiction" (133-68). Examining post-trial proceedings in manuscript notes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to find cases which became influential, despite poor or abbreviated reports, he demonstrates lucidly how such notes can elucidate or change a precedent in a printed report. Providing an appendix of the texts of some fascinating examples, Oldham's paper should be required reading for all modern law students and practitioners.	5
The equity side of law reporting has been ably represented by two early modern contributions. Alain Wijffels's "Sir Julius Caesar's Notes on Admiralty Cases" (89-112) collates Caesar's notes and correspondence on about 350 admiralty cases, 1582-1606, with the extant records of the court. Wijffels suggests that the purpose of Caesar's notes was to clarify the court's work because its records lacked the pleadings, and its decisions the subject and facts of the case. Wijffels then compares the text of Caesar's Responsa to Gentili's Hispanica Advocatio in order to understand why Gentili's collection was later published but not Caesar's. Michael Macnair's "The Nature and Function of the Early Chancery Reports" (123-32) is perhaps the most cogent and succinct paper. Exploring the minefield of Chancery ca. 1540-1640, he divides Chancery reports expertly into three categories, discerning their origins and significance. Macnair concludes that these collections reveal that substantive rules were as significant as procedural ones in the years 1540-90 and stabilized over the same period, reflecting a development parallel to that of the common law experience.	6
Other contributions include William Gordon, writing on the acts of the Scottish Privy Council in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries based on a 1754 printed collection of a lost sixteenth-century register (55-71). He concludes that Scottish law reports in this era were in embryo, retrospective, and not contemporary. Two papers on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English law reports are somewhat of an addendum to the volume. Steve Hedley's "Words, Words, Words: Making Sense of Legal Judgments, 1875-1940" (169-86) examines why law reports increased in size with more narrow arguments and sources, and fewer references to custom, legal texts, and foreign sources. Raymond Cocks's "Planning Law and Precedent" (187-97) provides a brief history of planning law and its precedents which preserved the countryside through restrictions, controls, and regulations.	7
Louis A. Knafla University of Calgary

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