A New Manuscript Witness of William Fleetwood’s ‘Instruccions coment et en quell maner Statutes serrount expoundes’ (c. 1578) (Jonathan McGovern)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2535581
Abstract:
This article introduces and transcribes a hitherto unidentified manuscript witness of William Fleetwood’s ‘Instruccions coment et en quell maner Statutes serrount expoundes’ (Folger Shakespeare Library MS X.d.656). It proposes a revised account of Fleetwood’s work on statutory interpretation. Scholars have failed to distinguish between two separate works on statute law composed by Fleetwood. The first is ‘A discourse upon the exposicion & understandinge of statutes’, written in English between 1557 and 1571, and edited by Samuel E. Thorne in 1942. The second is ‘Instruccions coment et en quell maner Statutes serrount expoundes’, a digest from Plowden’s Reports written in Law French in c. 1578. Both texts were later combined into a single English treatise, printed in 1657. This later act of compilation has confused later scholarship by occluding the fact that the two texts were originally independent compositions.
The Archival Sources and the Administration of Criminal Justice: Using the Scottish Justiciary Court Records (Stephanie Dropuljik) (OPEN ACCESS)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2561571
Abstract:
This article examines the records of Scotland's early modern criminal court, the justiciary court, which sat in Edinburgh. The focus is on the JC2, JC6, and JC1 series of records. While some of these records have been selectively published, their formation, compilation, and custodial practices have not been thoroughly studied before. This study represents the first in-depth investigation into these records and draws several significant conclusions. By analyzing the court's administrative practices, this study sheds new light on criminal justice administration, the court's clerking and record-keeping traditions, and how these records were created. It also identifies a previously unrecognized change in practice – the discontinuation of minute books. By revisiting these archival records, this article aims to reveal valuable insights into the justiciary court's practices and to enhance our understanding of its record-keeping traditions.
The Satsuma Mutiny and the Inter-colonial Origins of the Fugitive Offenders Act 1881 (Ivan Lee)
DOI 10.1080/01440365.2025.2530429
Abstract:
This article explores the origins of the Fugitive Offenders Act 1881, which regulated the surrender or ‘rendition’ of fugitives between British territories until 1967. Notable as the precursor to modern laws regulating extradition between independent Commonwealth nations – laws that still exist today – the 1881 Act was enacted after a mutiny on the Satsuma, a British merchant ship, in 1874. The story of this mutiny and its legal context has never been told. Recorded in court depositions, newspaper reports, and official correspondence, the Satsuma case involved five seamen who, after mutinying at sea, fled to Melbourne, London, and Hong Kong. Imperial and colonial officials struggled to bring the mutineers to justice, as the case exposed the inadequacies of existing laws for arresting and trying fugitives who crossed the many internal borders of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Earlier attempts to reform the law had failed owing to official inaction, parochialism, and deference to the imperial repugnancy doctrine. Where those attempts failed, the Fugitive Offenders Act succeeded in creating a new rendition regime, anchoring the imperial history of international criminal law.
Book reviews:
- Execution, State and Society in England, 1660–1900 by Simon Devereaux, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 19+ 378 pp., £100 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-009-39215-0 (James Gregory)
- The Immigration of Irish Lawyers to Australia in the 19th Century: Causes and Consequences by the late Dr John Kennedy Mclaughlin AM, Sydney, Federation Press, 2024, v-xxv, 292 pp, AU$79.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-76002-453-6 (Mark Lunney)
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