Author: John Cairns

Home of Louis Moreau Lislet, drafter of the Louisiana Code, for sale

Louisiana

This blog has a keen interest in the legal history of Louisiana. Georgia Chadwick of the State Law Library of Louisiana has drawn to its attention the discovery by Daphne Tassin, a member of her staff, that the home into which Moreau moved in 1809, and lived until he died in 1832, is currently for sale at 1027 Chartres Street, New Orleans, formerly Condé Street. See Levasseur's biography of Moreau Lislet at p. 123. Pictures of this large property can be found on a New Orleans realtor's website: http://www.fqr.com/index/listings/multi-family/details/807729

Freedom of the Seas

Old Books

Readers of ths blog may be interested in the new Exhibition in the Rare Books Department of the Yale Law School Library. This is devoted to Freedom of the Seas, focusing around the publication of Mare Liberum on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, some four hundred years ago. For those who cannot visit, pictures of the exhibits will be displayed on the Yale Law Library, Rare Books Blog (which can in general be recommended as excellent).

Selden famously replied to Grotius with Mare Clausum; less well known is the response of the Scotsman, and sometime Professor of Law at St Andrews University, William Welwood. Welwood, who had studied at St Andrews and Wittenberg, replied in his Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes of 1613 and later in De dominio maris (1615). It is interesting to note that Welwood's critique was the only one to which Grotius in fact composed a reply. Some of Welwood's arguments were adopted by Grotius when he came to write De iure belli ac pacis (1625), in which he now agreed with Welwood that territorial waters could be possessed.

For the Scots, one of the continuing anxieties about Grotius' arguments was protection of the herring fisheries off the shores of Scotland from Dutch fishermen. These were of enormous economic importance to Scotland, and this anxiety was often reflected in the Scottish records from the middle ages onwards.

See http://blogs.law.yale.edu/blogs/rarebooks/archive/tags/Freedom+of+the+Seas+1609+exhibit/default.aspx

See also Hugo Grotius, The Free Sea, ed. by David Armitage, Liberty Fund, 2004, available online at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/859

Professor Mario Talamanca

In memoriam

Readers of the blog will be saddened to hear of the sudden death on 11 June of Professor Mario Talamanca of the University of Rome (La Sapienza).

Professor Talamanca was one of the leading scholars of Roman law in the last fifty years. A prolific author, Talamanca was a charismatic man of very considerable charm. He was a regular at the annual Roman law conference of the Société internationale 'Fernand de Visscher' pour les Droits de l'Antiquité  (SIHDA). In 2001 a Festschrift was published in his honour: Iuris vincula: (studi in onore di Mario Talamanca).  For some recent photographs of Professor Talamanca, see http://www.unav.es/catedragarrigues/english/events/lawjurisprudenceroman.html

100 Years of Women in Law: An Edinburgh Centenary

News and Events

In 1909 Eveline MacLaren and Josephine Gordon Stuart became Scotland's first female law graduates: both were awarded an LLB from the Faculty of Law at Edinburgh. This academic year, to mark the centenary, the Edinburgh Law School is celebrating the achievements of its distinguished women graduates. This started on 2 June with an excellent lecture by Professor Hector L. MacQueen on the first two graduates in their historic context. For further details, see http://womeninlaw.law.ed.ac.uk/

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Legal History Doctoral Scholarship

Opportunities

The Edinburgh Law School is pleased to announce that it proposes to elect an Allan Menzies Scholar to study for the degree of PhD starting in September 2009. This is a scholarship for three years covering fees (at home/EU level) with a stipend for maintenance comparable to those offered by the AHRC and the ESRC.

The holder of the scholarship will be expected to research and write a thesis on a topic reflecting the history and growth of Scots property law in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The School is particularly interested in theses that reflect the relationship of property law to intellectual, economic, and social changes arising out of Enlightenment and industrialisation.

Candidates should have a degree in law (not necessarily from Scotland) or in another relevant discipline.

Application Procedure
The deadline for applications for the Allan Menzies Scholarship is 30 June 2009. Applicants must satisfy the School's usual criteria for admission and must apply for admission as a PhD student in the normal way. In parallel to that application, applicants should send a separate email to pg.law@ed.ac.uk to indicate that they wish to be considered for this award.

Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact Professor John W. Cairns (Chair of Legal History) or Professor Kenneth Reid (Chair of Property Law).

 

Important new Book on the History of Scots Law

New Books

Reflecting the recent work on the history of Scots law, it is important to note the publication of Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court, by A. Mark Godfrey. Since the earlier work of Hannay, the foundations of the College of Justice have deserevd a proper re-assessment in the light of the new research. Godfrey's excellent new book does that. Though published by Brill at an eye-watering € 152.00 / US$ 243.00, it deserves to be widely read. It has implications far beyond the history of Scots law. Taken with John Finlay's Men of Law in Pre-Reformation Scotland, published by Tuckwell in 2000, we now have a real understanding of this era and these events.

Important Symposium: Law of Nations in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Legal History

 The currently popular and useful idea of the Atlantic World – associated with David Armitage, among others – founds what looks to be an important short conference in Chicago. "Symposium on Comparative Early Modern Legal History 2009 Conference": "The Law of Nations and the Early Modern Atlantic World". This takes place on Friday 3 April 2009 at the Newberry Library, Chicago. It is organised by: Eliga Gould (University of New Hampshire) and Richard J.  Ross (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Further details may be found at http://www.newberry.org/renaissance/seminars/legal.html

 

Bicentenary of the Digest of Orleans (1808)

Louisiana

2008 was the bicentenary of the Louisiana Civil Code. Among various events commemorating this was an important conference at Tulane Law School, hosted by the Easson-Weinmann Centre, and organised by Professor Vernon Palmer. While some of this was devoted to the issue of codification generally – and the evergreen and ever so tedious topic of a European code of private law – there was a day of very important papers on the history of the law of Louisiana, in which some excellent research was presented. Most will be published relatively soon. For details of the Conference, see http://www.law.tulane.edu/uploadedFiles/Life_After_Law_School/CLE/PDFs_for_Events_and_Conferences/Civil%20Code%20Celebration%20Brochure.pdf

The legal history papers have now been published in the Tulane European and civil Law Forum. vol. 24 (2009)

The author of this entry visited the grave of Louis Moreau Lislet, one of the compilers of the Digest, in the  atmospheric cemetery familiar to those of you who remember the film Easy Rider. (Photo courtesy of Georgia Chadwick, Director, Law Library of Louisiana)

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Important Books Return to Edinburgh

Old Books

In 1544, an English knight looted a set of 16 books – 15 of which were on Civil or Canon law – from Edinburgh. Until recently these were in the Athenaeum in Liverpool. They have now been acquired by the National Library of Scotland. What is notable is that they came from Cambuskenneth Abbey near Stirling. The first President of the College of Justice was Alexander Mylne, Abbot of Cambuskenneth. This emphasises the importance of these books for the history of Scots law in the first half of the sixteenth century. See p. 12 of http://www.nls.uk/about/discover-nls/issues/discover-nls-10.pdf

Mylne's own copy of the Infortiatum (Lyons, 1514) has survived. His ownership inscription is dated 1516 and records his then offices of Canon of Dunkeld and Official of Dunkeld. See http://www.lyonandturnbull.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=103++++++276+&refno=+++53892

Study of these works may throw considerable light on the develoment of Scots law in the first half of the sixteenth century

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