David Lemmings

Professors of the law : barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century

I. INTRODUCTION: TWO STORIES OF THE LAW Historians, the Law, and Eighteenth-Century Society Another Story of the Law: the Reputation of Lawyers and the Courts II. THE WORK OF THE BAR AND WORKING LIFE Advocacy and Pleading: The Shape of Barristers Work Counselling and Conveying Everyday Life III. BARRISTERS AND PRACTISERS: NUMBERS AND PROSPECTS Barristers and Non Practisers Practisers: Supply and Demand The Characteristics of Litigation: A Crisis in Westminster Hall? Prospects for Barristers: Keeping Life Going IV. GENTLEMEN BRED TO THE LAW: INDUCTION AND LEGAL EDUCATION Motives and Qualifications: Hopes and Dreams The Failure of Institutions: Education at the Universities and the Inns A Dry and Disgusting Study: Learning the Law A Cultural Challenge? V. PRACTICE AT THE CENTRE: WESTMINSTER HALL AND ITS SATELLITES Starting Out: Launching A Practice Winners and Losers: The Distribution of Work in Westminster Hall Getting On: Practices, Fees, and Incomes VI. PRACTICE AT THE MARGINS: THE OLD BAILEY AND THE COLONIES Tribunes of the People: The Old Bailey Bar Law, Lawyers, and Ireland and America: Colonial Bars and Barristers Law, Lawyers, and 1776: Contrasting American Attorneys and English Barristers VII. ADVANCEMENT AND INDEPENDENCE Rank and Status at the Inns of Court: Internal Promotion Patronage, Politics, and Office: External Promotion Serving the State? The Independence of Bar and Bench VIII. CONCLUSION: THE CULTURE OF THE BAR AND THE RECESSION OF THE COMMON LAW Collective Life and Rituals 24. Self-Images: Collective Self-Esteem and Legitimating Concepts Self-Images: Collective Self-Esteem and Legitimating Concepts Consequences? : The Failure of the Bar and Recession of the Common Law Appendix A: Methodology and Biographical Notes for Barrister Samples, 1719-21 and 1769-71 Appendix B: A Prescription for Educating a Barrister, 1736 Appendix C: Leading Counsel In Kings Bench, Exchequer, Common Pleas, and Chancery, 1720, 1740, 1770, 1790 Appendix D: A Junior Barristers Complaints about the Selection and Advantage of Kings Counsel, 1750

Blackstone and Law Reform by Education: Preparation for the Bar and Lawyerly Culture in Eighteenth-Century England

In his opening lecture at Oxford as Vinerian professor of the laws of England, Dr. William Blackstone introduced his subject with a statement of his “diffidence,” which amounts almost to an apologia for academic study of the law: “He must be sensible how much will depend upon his conduct in the infancy of a study, which is now first adopted by public academical authority; which has generally been reputed (however unjustly) of a dry and unfruitful nature; and of which the theoretical, elementary parts have hitherto received a very moderate share of cultivation.”

Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century

Preface and Acknowledgements List of Tables Note on Works Cited in Endnotes Introduction: Law, Consent and Command The Local Experience of Law and Authority: Quarter Sessions, JPs, and the People Going to Law: the Rise and Fall of Civil Litigation Crime and the Administration of Criminal Law: Problems, Solutions, and Participation Parliament, Legislation and the People: the Idea and Experience of Leviathan Conclusion: Governance, People and Law in the Eighteenth Century

Introduction: Law and Order, Moral Panics, and Early Modern England

Most adults living in Western societies today who consume the popular press and electronic media will have experienced a moral panic, ‘one of those episodes in which public anxieties, especially as expressed and orchestrated by the press and by government actions, serve to “amplify deviance” and to promote new measures for its control’.1 For scholars of modern society, moral panics represent the normal constitution and reconstitution of the social order by majorities who regularly identify ‘social problems’ and deviant groups: this is usually facilitated by reportage and comment in the mass media and in legislative assemblies. More broadly conceived, moral panics have a long history, but it is arguable that the quintessentially modern ‘law and order’ species originated in eighteenth-century England, with the hitherto unknown conjunction of a broad-circulation press, the anxiety-driven middle-class public and regular parliamentary sessions. After 1700, English society experienced uniquely rapid growth in the consumption of printed materials, especially newspapers, magazines and satirical prints. The primary audience for the press was the rising middle class, ‘respectable’ people of property and commerce who were defining their identities in the burgeoning ‘public sphere’ of reading, writing and association. They were both alarmed and fascinated by new social and economic conditions in the rapidly growing towns and cities, especially in the metropolis of London.

The concept of the moral panic : an historico-sociological positioning

This opening paragraph by Stanley Cohen is among the most cited in the sociology of deviance and the media. Indeed, as Critcher observes, many users of the concept of the moral panic quote no more than this passage and extrapolate from single case studies to a much more extensive sociocultural condition, meaning that ‘Ironically “moral panic” has itself become a label, its application used as proof that little more need be said’.1 The concept of the moral panic has also entered the popular lexicon via the sociological dictionary in a comparatively short time and in numerous, multiplying discursive sites. To take a fairly random and unlikely example, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in launching a report on university subject areas that are strategically important and vulnerable, is reported as using it in seeking to allay anxiety, with a story opening in the education press as follows: There is no need for a ‘great moral panic’ if university courses close in future, funding chiefs declared this week ….2

Conclusion: Moral Panics, Law and the Transformation of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England

As suggested in the introduction, comparison of the panics discussed in this book provides the opportunity to make some critical comments about the changing relationship between opinion, governance and law during the two centuries or so between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Jurgen Habermas’s seminal account of the bourgeois public sphere may provide useful conceptual assistance in this task, so I want to begin this final chapter by summarizing the main features of his theory.

Narratives of feeling and majesty: mediated emotions in the eighteenth-century criminal courtroom

ABSTRACT This article considers the role of emotion in the eighteenth-century courtroom. It discusses the work of judges and magistrates in constituting and upholding a ‘grand narrative’, which legitimized English criminal law. This grand narrative was inherently emotional, activating patriotism and love of justice, but also fear of punishment through the performance of ‘emotional labour’ from the judgment seat. However, while performing the majesty of the law, judges attempted to balance a number of complicating factors, such as the rise of sensibility, the role of the press, and their own emotions about criminal justice. The growing presence of professional counsel from the end of the century also complicated the emotional tenor of criminal trials. Moreover, the majesty of the law was undermined and even corrupted by the representation of trials and executions in the popular press. Far from viewing displays of emotion as inappropriate, it appears that many contemporaries held emotion to be an integral part of trial process, and of the majesty of the law.

Henry Fielding and English Crime and Justice Reportage, 1748–52: Narratives of Panic, Authority, and Emotion

abstract:This essay discusses representations of crime and justice in London during the years of Henry Fielding’s Bow Street magistracy (1748–54), with an emphasis on his management of the press and its influence on popular feeling. Contemporary newspaper reports about Fielding and his thieftakers offered comforting narratives about authority triumphing over disorder. His Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury (1749) and Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751), however, described a crisis of lawlessness. Finally, his Covent Garden Journal (1752) invested offenders’ stories with strong elements of humor, compassion, and prurient interest. I conclude that Fielding’s literary and commercial instincts inspired polyvocal representations of passion and compassion that undermined the “authorized” message of law and justice.

Emotional Light on Eighteenth-Century Print Culture

An established narrative in eighteenth-century studies of Britain details the early dominance of satire, the increase in sympathetic cultural modes, and the implications for different kinds of sociability generated by the long revolution in print culture.1 In this book, we do not wish to overturn this scholarship because we agree that it addresses fundamental aspects of change and stability in the society and culture of a nation that was rising to global prominence. Certainly the self-congratulatory Whig reading of history that has everything rising on a tide of progress towards some sort of liberal apotheosis has been very validly exposed to revision. Without the iron teleology, however, the chapters in this volume are unified by a conviction that important changes did occur in culture and society during the 1700s, and that they were linked dialogically with shifts in the ways emotions were experienced and valued.

Crime and the Administration of Criminal Law: Problems, Solutions and Participation

There is abundant evidence of unprecedented public sensitivity to crime in eighteenth-century England. Certainly the mushroom growth of London, the repeated social and economic disturbances caused by the return of soldiers and sailors from wars, and the supposedly corrupting effects of unprecedented personal wealth, appeared to be serious grounds for concern about rising crime rates. But the totals of indictments were relatively low by modern standards: it is clear that anxieties about crime were magnified and focused by the growth of the press; and perhaps in turn by higher expectations of personal conduct created by increased public exchange and developing middling consciousness.1 Before 1700 the vast majority of people’s knowledge of crime was confined to their limited personal experience, or to comments and advice in sermons and assize or quarter sessions charges. But with the proliferation of newspapers and magazines knowledge about localized criminality could be shared all over the country. And it was hardly objective knowledge: commercial imperatives ensured that columns had to be filled and readers’ interests, tastes and prejudices had to be catered for; while editorial policies varied according to particular markets and opportunities, as well as the changing availability of alternative stories and the strengths and weaknesses of competitors.2