Legal history or the history of law is the study of how law has evolved and why it has changed. Legal history is closely connected to the development of civilizations and operates in the wider context of social history. Certain jurists and historians of legal process have seen legal history as the recording of the evolution of laws and the technical explanation of how these laws have evolved with the view of better understanding the origins of various legal concepts; some consider legal history a branch of intellectual history. Twentieth-century historians viewed legal history in a more contextualised manner – more in line with the thinking of social historians. They have looked at legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols and have seen these elements interact with society to change, adapt, resist or promote certain aspects of civil society. Such legal historians have tended to analyze case histories from the parameters of social-science inquiry, using statistical methods, analysing class distinctions among litigants, petitioners and other players in various legal processes. By analyzing case outcomes, transaction costs, and the number of settled cases, they have begun examining legal institutions, practices, procedures, and briefs offering a more nuanced picture of law and society than traditional legal studies of jurisprudence, case law and civil codes can achieve.
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👉 Legal history in the context of Constitutional history
Constitutional history is the area of historical study covering both written constitutions and uncodified constitutions, and became an academic discipline during the 19th century. The Oxford Companion to Law (1980) defined it as the study of the "origins, evolution and historical development" of the constitution of a community.
The English term is attributed to Henry Hallam, in his 1827 work The Constitutional History of England. It overlaps legal history and political history. For uncodified constitutions, the status of documents seen as contributing to the formation of a constitution has an aspect of diplomatics.
Legal history in the context of Jurisprudence
Jurisprudence, also known as theory of law or philosophy of law, is the examination in a general perspective of what law is and what it ought to be. It investigates issues such as the definition of law; legal validity; legal norms and values; and the relationship between law and other fields of study, including economics, ethics, history, sociology, and political philosophy.
Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was based on the first principles of natural law, civil law, and the law of nations. Contemporary philosophy of law addresses problems internal to law and legal systems and problems of law as a social institution that relates to the larger political and social context in which it exists. Jurisprudence can be divided into categories both by the type of question scholars seek to answer and by the theories of jurisprudence, or schools of thought, regarding how those questions are best answered:
Legal history in the context of King's Law
The King's Law (Danish: Kongeloven) or Lex Regia (also called the Danish Royal Law of 1665) was the absolutist constitution of Denmark and Norway from 1665 until 1849 and 1814, respectively. It established complete hereditary and absolute monarchy and formalized the king's absolute power, and is regarded the most sovereign form of all the European expressions of absolutism. Some scholars of legal history assert that with Europe's least circumscribed form of absolutism, Denmark "may be considered the most absolute of all the absolute European monarchies." It is the only formal constitution of any absolute monarchy, and has therefore been the subject of considerable historical and academic attention.
The King's Law comprises 40 articles and is divided into seven main chapters. Articles 1 to 7 determine the royal absolute power, and the following articles contain rules on the king's authority and guardianship, on the king's accession and anointing, on the indivisibility of the kingdoms, on princes and princesses, on the king's duty to maintain absolute monarchy, and on the succession.
Legal history in the context of Henry Sumner Maine
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, KCSI, FRS (15 August 1822 – 3 February 1888), was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his book Ancient Law that law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status dealing with(in) a particular group while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and sociology of law.
Legal history in the context of Frederic William Maitland
Frederic William Maitland FBA (28 May 1850 – c. 19 December 1906) was an English historian of medieval England and jurist who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history. From 1884 until he died in 1906, he was Reader in English Law at Cambridge. He was Downing Professor of the Laws of England. He came from a distinguished intellectual family. Maitland was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge. Leaving for the bar after an initial failure to obtain a fellowship at Cambridge, he returned to academia in 1884 and quickly became one of the most distinguished historians of his generation.