The decision in 1907 to grant habeas corpus in favour of Eddie Guerin, a notorious criminal widely known as the man who escaped from Devil's Island, attracted attention at the time in the popular press but has been largely ignored by lawyers. The judgment of the court was brief and the issue decided appeared to be entirely factual. Yet the case was a remarkable one from a legal perspective which merits further attention. It deals with a difficult and crucially important legal point—the burden of proof and the resolution of issues of disputed fact on habeas corpus—in a most unusual and intriguing way.

It has been suggested by several writers that property of an intangible nature, such as debts, should be subject to the same choice of law rules as those which govern tangible property and immovable property. The idea that the lex situs should be adopted to determine proprietary questions relating to debts is particularly prevalent in cases where the English courts are called upon to decide whether to recognise a foreign government's actions or whether to garnish a debt. But should one of the most dominant choice of law rules, that of the lex situs, gain an even wider application than it already clearly has? Before answering this question any suggestion that the lex situs should be adopted for matters relating to debts has to face the obvious logic that that which cannot be touched or moved cannot be said to be capable of a position or a situation. This is, of course, self-evident but apart from an occasional assertion the courts have not felt constrained by the logic of the matter and for a number of purposes they have stated rules to give a debt that characteristic which it lacks: a physical location.

The history in the eighteenth century of attorneys and solicitors—those who “practiced the forms or ‘mechanics’ of the law”—was first investigated in depth in Robert Robson's monograph of 1959. More recently, and following upon Geoffrey Holmes's suggestive survey of the lawyers in Augustan England, articles by M. Miles and A. Aylett have enlarged our knowledge of the social origins and geographical distribution of attorneys over the century as a whole and offered detailed analyses of attorneys' business in the West Riding and Cheshire during the latter half of the century.