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Chancery Reform and Law Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Joshua Getzler
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Extract

Michael Lobban shows how dissatisfaction with the law-equity split in English civil justice predated the Judicature Act reforms by two generations at least (one could argue two-and-a half centuries or more—periodization fails quickly). Lobban links the first modern debates over fusion to high legal politics on the one hand and to the more intricate internal problems of evidence, procedure, and jurisdiction on the other. Lawyers of the earlier Victorian age found the Chancery system bequeathed to them by Lord Eldon to be intolerable on two counts: it represented Old Corruption or monopolistic private control of public offices and it exacted heavy costs in procedural inconvenience, cost, and delay. Lobban does not see ideology such as Benthamite philosophy driving the rationalization of Chancery doctrine and institutions though he does not dismiss this factor entirely.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Fall 2004 , pp. 601 - 608
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2004

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References

1. See Lobban, Michael, “Preparing for Fusion: Reforming the Nineteenth-Century Court of Chancery. Parts I and II,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 389–427, 565–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For the earlier history, see Macnair's, M. R. T. magisterial study, The Law of Proof in Early Modern Equity (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999).Google Scholar

3. Maitland, F. W., letter to M. M. Bigelow, 19 April 1906, in The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. Fifoot, C. H. S. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press and the Seiden Society, 1965), 372.Google Scholar

4. Polden, Patrick, “Mingling the Waters: Personalities, Politics and the Making of the Supreme Court of Judicature,” Cambridge Law Journal 61.3 (2002): 575–611 at 580–82.Google Scholar

5. P.P. 1818 (276) VI.

6. 6 Geo. IV, c. 16, in 136 sections.

7. Regulations in Bankruptcy (1801) 6 Vesey Junior 1.

8. See, e.g., Moulton, Joseph White, The Chancery Practice of the State of New York, 3 vols., (New York: O. Halsted, 1829–1832)Google Scholar; Henderson, John Greene, Chancery Practice (Chicago: T. H. Flood & Co., 1904).Google Scholar