JOURNAL: Comparative Legal History X (2022), No. 1

(image source: Routledge)

Editorial (Agustín Parise & Matthew Dyson)

Corpus linguistics: the digital tool kit for analysing language and the law (Caroline Laske)
Abstract:

Corpus linguistics methodologies offer innovative ways of reading legal historical sources. Studying the language of source texts using computational techniques that retrieve linguistic data makes detailed searches of words, phrases, and lexical/grammatical patterns and structures possible and provides multiple contextual data that is both quantitative and qualitative, empirical rather than intuitive. It helps us understand not just what is being said, but also how it is being said, how language is used to encode meanings, and what that can tell us about underlying contents and the socio-political, cultural, geopolitical, economic, and other contexts and discourses in which these texts were produced. This paper argues that the use of corpus linguistics is relevant across comparative legal history and can be applied in comparative legal historical research independent of the area of the law or the historical period. Detailed studies incorporating corpus linguistics will be discussed to show the potential of this methodological shift.

(DOI 10.1080/2049677X.2022.2063510) 

Coke’s Prohibitions del Roy in a European perspective (Gustaaf van Nifterik)

Abstract:

Edward Coke’s Prohibitions del Roy (1608) at first sight seems a typically English discourse: a common law judge arguing for the independence of the common law courts from his king and from the conciliar courts and civil law jurists. A closer look from a European position reveals another picture, however. Compared with discussions by his (near) contemporaries Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, Jean Bodin, and Hugo de Groot, it turns out that Coke’s plea fits neatly in a Europe-wide process resulting from growing tension between iurisdictio and imperium and between the traditional and voluntarist approaches of the state and public power, as well as an increase in public functions, that necessitated a sharp distinction between the judicature and the administration. Both in theory and practice new balances had to be found. This article focusses on the theory.

(DOI  10.1080/2049677X.2022.2063517) [OPEN ACCESS]

A shared professional space: networks of colonial lawyers in Cuba and Mexico (1508–1832) (Ricardo Pelegrin Taboada)

Abstract:

During the colonial period, legal professionals from Mexico and Cuba maintained a closed relationship. Legal experts arrived in America to join the colonial establishment, but excessive litigiousness among settlers forced the Crown to forbid lawyers from overseas. However, it became increasingly necessary for functionaries to hold law degrees to occupy municipal positions, and thus, Spain created colonial universities. Cuban students increasingly studied law in Mexico and, upon graduation, joined the professional network across the Spanish Empire. The foundation of the University of Havana in 1728 further strengthened the intellectual connections between Cuba and Mexico. In 1760, Mexican elites created a Colegio de Abogados with strict membership requirements based on lineage, race, and class, and lawyers in Havana submitted a petition to open their own Colegio in 1812 to preserve the exclusivity of the legal professions.

(DOI 10.1080/2049677X.2022.2063518)

Book reviews

• Britain and international law in West Africa. The practice of empire by Inge van Hulle, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2020, 320 pp., £80 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-198-86986-3 (by Moritz Koenig)
• Professional guilds and the history of insurance: a comparative analysis edited by Philip Hellwege, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2020, 288 pp., €99.90 (hbk), ISBN 978-3428180714 (by Gijs Dreijer)
• Negotiations of gender and property through legal regimes (fourteenth-nineteenth century). Stipulating, litigating, mediating edited by Margereth Lanzinger, Janine Maegraith, Siglinde Clementi, Ellinor Foster and Christian Hagen, Leiden/Boston, Brill, 2021, 445 pp., €130 (hbk), ISBN 978-9004454187 (by Helle Vogt)
• Nordic inheritance law through the ages. Spaces of action and legal strategies edited by Marianne Holdgaard, Auður Magnúsdóttir and Bodil Selmer, Leiden, Brill, 2020, 418 pp., €129 (hbk), ISBN 978-9004427358 (by Elsa Trolle Önnerfors)
• Medicine and justice: medico-legal practice in England and Wales, 1700–1914 by Katherine D. Watson, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2020, 312 pp., £36.99 (hbk), ISBN 978-472454126 (by Ian Burney)
• Gender and careers in the legal academy edited by Ulrike Schultz, Gisela Shaw, Margaret Thornton and Rosemary Auchmuty, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2021, 592 pp., €79.95 (pbk), ISBN 978-1509923113 (by Victoria Barnes)

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