Magna Carta Libertatum, commonly called Magna Carta, is a royal charter of rights agreed to by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. First drafted by Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton to make peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons, it promised the protection of church rights, protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and limitations on feudal payments to the Crown, to be implemented through a council of 25 barons. Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War.
Natural law is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independent of positive law. According to natural law theory, all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason." Natural law theory can also refer to "theories of ethics, theories of politics, theories of civil law, and theories of religious morality."
Sir William Blackstone was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England. 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, 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 became heavily involved 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 Warton Building, and simplifying the complex accounting system used by the college. On 3 July 1753 he formally gave up his practice as a barrister and instead embarked on a series of lectures on English law, the first of their kind. These were massively successful, earning him a total of £453, and led to the publication of An Analysis of the Laws of England in 1756, which repeatedly sold out and was used to preface his later works.
The Commentaries on the Laws of England are an influential 18th-century treatise on the common law of England by Sir William Blackstone, originally published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford, 1765–1770. The work is divided into four volumes, on the rights of persons, the rights of things, of private wrongs and of public wrongs.
In the 1760s William Blackstone described the Fundamental Laws of England in Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First – Chapter the First : Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals as "the absolute rights of every Englishman" and traced their basis and evolution as follows:
Coverture was a legal doctrine in common law whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife's legal status of feme covert. An unmarried woman, or feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. Coverture arises from the legal fiction that a husband and wife are one person.
Federalist No. 78 is an essay by Alexander Hamilton, the seventy-eighth of The Federalist Papers. Like all of The Federalist papers, it was published under the pseudonym Publius.
In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio is the idea that:
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.
The "rights of Englishmen" are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters and particularly with regards to taxation. Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.
The Charter of the Forest of 1217 is a charter that re-established for free men rights of access to the royal forest that had been eroded by William the Conqueror and his heirs. Many of its provisions were in force for centuries afterwards. It was originally sealed in England by the young King Henry III, acting under the regency of William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke. It was in many ways a companion document to Magna Carta. The Charter redressed some applications of the Anglo-Norman Forest Law that had been extended and abused by William Rufus.
The Discourses of Epictetus are a series of informal lectures by the Stoic philosopher Epictetus written down by his pupil Arrian around 108 AD. Four books out of an original eight are still extant. The philosophy of Epictetus is intensely practical. He directs his students to focus attention on their opinions, anxieties, passions, and desires, so that "they may never fail to get what they desire, nor fall into what they avoid." True education lies in learning to distinguish what is our own from what does not belong to us, and in learning to correctly assent or dissent to external impressions. The purpose of his teaching was to make people free and happy.
In law, a moiety title is the ownership of part of a property. The word derives from Old French moitié, "half", from Latin medietas ("middle"), from medius.
Wilfrid Prest, AM is a historian, specialising in legal history, who is professor emeritus at the University of Adelaide. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and a member of the Council of the Selden Society, London.
The Blackstone Career Institute, based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and founded in 1890, offers distance education programs and home study programs, specializing in courses students can use to study at home or take online to advance their careers. Training includes courses that prepare a student for a career as a Paralegal/Legal Assistant, Pharmacy Technician, Medical Transcription, Medical Billing and Coding, Medical Office Assistant, Dental Office Assistant, Physical Therapy Aide, Veterinary Assistant and Child Care Provider.
A reception statute is a statutory law adopted as a former British colony becomes independent by which the new nation adopts, or receives, the English common law before its independence to the extent not explicitly rejected by the legislative body or constitution of the new nation. Reception statutes generally consider the English common law dating prior to independence, as well as the precedents originating from it, as the default law because of the importance of using an extensive and predictable body of law to govern the conduct of citizens and businesses in a new state.
Sir Henry Finch was an English lawyer and politician, created serjeant-at-law and knighted, and remembered as a legal writer.
An Analysis of the Laws of England is a legal treatise by British legal professor William Blackstone. It was first published by the Clarendon Press in 1756. A Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a lecturer there, on 3 July 1753 Blackstone announced his intentions to give a set of lectures on the common law — the first lectures of that sort in the world. A prospectus was issued on 23 June 1753, and with a class of approximately 20 students, the first lecture series was completed by July 1754. Despite Blackstone's limited oratory skills and a speaking style described by Jeremy Bentham as "formal, precise and affected", Blackstone's lectures were warmly appreciated. The second and third series were far more popular, partially due to his then unusual use of printed handouts and lists of suggested reading. These show Blackstone's attempts to reduce English law to a logical system, with the division of subjects later being the basis for his Commentaries. The lecture series brought him £116, £226 and £111 a year respectively from 1753 to 1755 — a total of £72,000 in 2021 terms. Seeing the success of this publication, Blackstone was induced to write An Analysis of the Laws of England, a 200-page introduction to English law, which was first published in 1756 by the Clarendon Press.
The body politic is a polity—such as a city, realm, or state—considered metaphorically as a physical body. Historically, the sovereign is typically portrayed as the body's head, and the analogy may also be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of Aesop's fable of "The Belly and the Members". The image originates in ancient Greek philosophy, beginning in the 6th century BC, and was later extended in Roman philosophy. Following the high and late medieval revival of the Byzantine Corpus Juris Civilis in Latin Europe, the "body politic" took on a jurisprudential significance by being identified with the legal theory of the corporation, gaining salience in political thought from the 13th century on. In English law the image of the body politic developed into the theory of the king's two bodies and the Crown as corporation sole.
Thomas Bever was an English civil lawyer and legal writer. He is known also as an antiquarian scholar and patron.
Legal education in England is the practice of teaching and learning English Law, whether to become a practicing lawyer or as an academic pursuit. Legal education has undergone significant changes over the last two thousand years, transforming from an exclusively apprenticeship-based process to one split across secondary education, the university, and the profession. Currently, university law degrees are regulated by the legal profession, which controls the core subjects a law degree must contain before graduates can pursue further professional qualification.
