Court of King's Bench (England) in the context of "Form of action"

Westminster Hall is a medieval great hall which forms part of the Palace of Westminster in London. It was built in 1097 for William II, and at that time was one of the largest halls in Europe. It is particularly notable for its hammerbeam roof, which was commissioned for Richard II in 1393 and built by the royal carpenter, Hugh Herland. At the same time the rest of the hall was remodelled by the master mason Henry Yevele. The hall survived the fire of 1834 and bombing in World War II and, in spite of various restorations, has maintained its medieval structure and many of its features.

The hall has served a variety of ceremonial and administrative functions throughout its history. From the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries it was home to the courts of King's Bench, Chancery, and Common Pleas. It was the scene of important state trials, including those of Thomas More,Guy Fawkes and King Charles I. Banquets and royal entertainments were hosted in the hall, with the last coronation banquet being that of George IV in 1821. Since the twentieth century, the hall has been the venue for the lyings in state of state funerals. It is used for special addresses by Parliament to the monarch, and is on rare occasions the venue for joint addresses to the two chambers of Parliament.

The Court of Common Pleas, or Common Bench, was a common law court in the English legal system that covered "common pleas"; actions between subject and subject, which did not concern the king. Created in the late 12th to early 13th century after splitting from the Exchequer of Pleas, the Common Pleas served as one of the central English courts for around 600 years. Authorised by Magna Carta to sit in a fixed location, the Common Pleas sat in Westminster Hall for its entire existence, joined by the Exchequer of Pleas and Court of King's Bench.

The court's jurisdiction was gradually undercut by the King's Bench and Exchequer of Pleas with legal fictions, the Bill of Middlesex and Writ of Quominus respectively. The Common Pleas maintained its exclusive jurisdiction over matters of real property until its dissolution, and due to its wide remit was considered by Sir Edward Coke to be the "lock and key of the common law". It was staffed by one Chief Justice and a varying number of puisne justices, who were required to be Serjeants-at-Law, and until the mid 19th century only Serjeants were allowed to plead there.

Colin Blackburn, Baron Blackburn, PC (18 May 1813 – 8 January 1896) was a British lawyer and judge. The son of a Scottish clergyman, he was educated in Scotland and England, before joining the English bar. He was little known to the legal world before he was elevated from the junior bar to a puisne judgeship in the Court of Queen's Bench by Lord Campbell in 1859, a position he held until 1876, when he was appointed to the Court of Appeal. In October of that year, he was the first person to be appointed as a law lord under the provisions of the newly enacted Appellate Jurisdiction Act. He retired in 1886 and died ten years later.

Sir William Blackstone (10 July 1723 – 14 February 1780) was an English jurist, justice, and Tory politician most noted for his Commentaries on the Laws of England, which became the best-known description of the doctrines of the English common law. Born into a middle-class family in London, Blackstone was educated at Charterhouse School before matriculating at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1738. After switching to and completing a Bachelor of Civil Law degree, he was made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, on 2 November 1743, admitted to Middle Temple, and called to the Bar there in 1746. Following a slow start to his career as a barrister, Blackstone was involved heavily in university administration, becoming accountant, treasurer, and bursar on 28 November 1746, and Senior Bursar in 1750. Blackstone is considered responsible for completing the Codrington Library and the Warton Building, and for simplifying the complex accounting system used by the college. On 3 July, 1753, he formally gave up his practice as a barrister, and embarked on a series of lectures on English law, the first of their kind. These talks were massively successful, earning him £453 (£94,000 in 2025 terms); they led to the publication of An Analysis of the Laws of England in 1756, which sold out repeatedly. It was used to preface his later works.

On 20 October, 1759, Blackstone was confirmed as the first Vinerian Professor of English Law, immediately embarking on another series of lectures and publishing a similarly successful second treatise, A Discourse on the Study of the Law. With his growing fame, he successfully returned to the bar and maintained a good practice, also securing election as Tory Member of Parliament for the rotten borough of Hindon on 30 March 1761. In November 1765 he published the first of four volumes of Commentaries on the Laws of England, considered his magnum opus; the completed work earned Blackstone £14,000 (£2,459,000 in 2023 terms). After repeated failures, he gained appointment to the judiciary as a justice of the Court of King's Bench on 16 February 1770, leaving to replace Edward Clive as a justice of the Common Pleas on 25 June. He remained in this position until his death, on 14 February 1780.

John Fortescue Aland, 1st Baron Fortescue of Credan (7 March 1670 – 19 December 1746) was an English lawyer, judge, politician and peer who sat in the British House of Commons from 1715 to 1717. Aland wrote on English legal and constitutional history, and was said to have influenced Thomas Jefferson. A member of both the Middle Temple and Inner Temple, he became a King's Counsel in 1714 and was then appointed Solicitor General, first to the Prince of Wales and then to his father George I in 1715. After a short stint as a member of parliament, Aland was knighted and elevated to the Bench as a Baron of the Exchequer in 1717. He was subsequently a justice of the Court of King's Bench (1718–1727) and of the Court of Common Pleas (1728–1746), save for a brief hiatus between 1727 and 1728 which has been attributed to George II's displeasure with one of his legal opinions.

In 1714, Aland wrote and published a volume titled The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Government based on a manuscript in the Bodleian Library by his distant ancestor Sir John Fortescue, to which he added an extended preface. This was possibly the earliest English-language work on constitutional history. Jefferson referred to Aland's views in the 1719 edition of this work, and in another preface by him on a 1748 collection of judicial decisions which he edited, titled Reports of Select Cases in All the Courts of Westminster-Hall.

The chief justice of the common pleas was the head of the Court of Common Pleas, also known as the Common Bench, which was the second-highest common law court in the English legal system until 1875, when it, along with the other two common law courts and the equity and probate courts, became part of the High Court of Justice. As such, the chief justice of the Common Pleas was one of the highest judicial officials in England, behind only the lord high chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice of England, who headed the King's Bench (Queen's when the monarch was female).

Somerset v Stewart (1772) 98 ER 499 (also known as Sommersett v Steuart, Somersett's case, and the Mansfield Judgment) is a judgment of the English Court of King's Bench in 1772, relating to the right of an enslaved person on English soil not to be forcibly removed from the country and sent to Jamaica for sale. According to one reported version of the case, Lord Mansfield decided that:

Lord Mansfield found that to the extent that the laws of England and Wales had ever permitted slavery, those laws were superseded by later law or otherwise defunct. This absence of a current English statute ("positive law") under which the court might remand someone as a slave proved decisive, as Mansfield refused to accept any other basis for the court to order something that he considered repugnant. The case was closely followed throughout the Empire, particularly in the thirteen American colonies, although the ruling had no direct or immediate effect outside Britain. A similar Scottish case concluded in 1778. Scholars have disagreed over precisely what legal precedent the Somerset case set.

Bench used in a legal context can have several meanings. First, it can simply indicate the location in a courtroom where a judge sits. Second, the term bench is a metonym used to describe members of the judiciary collectively, or the judges of a particular court, such as the King's Bench or the Common Bench in England and Wales, or the federal bench in the United States. Third, the term is used to differentiate judges, who are referred to as "the bench", from attorneys or barristers, who are referred to as "the bar". The phrase "bench and bar" denotes all judges and lawyers collectively. The term "full bench" is used when all the judges of a certain court sit together to hear a case, as in the phrase "before the full bench", which is also referred to as en banc.

The historical roots of the term come from judges formerly having sat on long seats or benches (freestanding or against a wall) when presiding over a court. The bench is usually an elevated desk area that allows a judge to view, and to be seen by, the entire courtroom. The bench was a typical feature of the courts of the Order of St. John in Malta, such as at the Castellania, where judges and the nominated College of Advocates sat for court cases and review laws.