Over thirty years ago Douglas Hay began his influential essay, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,” with the unsettling claim that “the rulers of eighteenth-century England cherished the death sentence.” He went on to offer a major reinterpretation of eighteenth-century justice, one with wide-ranging implications for how we understand English society in that period. The gallows, Hay argues, was meant to inspire terror. The passage of a large number of capital statutes spoke of the resolve of the ruling class to defend its property with the most extreme of measures. Yet the ultimate sanction was used sparingly. Hay's most important insight was to note the role of discretion in the operation of eighteenth-century justice. The choice not to impose death was as important as the occasions when offenders died. The elite deftly exploited these opportunities. The mercy dispensed by the Crown not only presented a more benign image of authority, it also taught the lessons of patronage and deference that instructed the lower orders in the proper attitude to take toward their social superiors. Thus justice worked more powerfully than religion to create legitimacy for the existing order.

In her work on the bourgeois male of the nineteenth century, Carol E. Harrison argues that “Although French law made no distinction between male and female associations, administrative practice ignored women in groups.” Most historians accept this point of view—that French administrators generally ignored the associational activities of women, and, indeed, most female groups appear to have garnered little notice from authorities. While Annie Grange suggests that this may be because so few female as-sociations existed throughout much of the nineteenth century, Catherine Duprat has uncovered numerous female societies, especially sociétés de bienfaisance, many of which received more generous treatment from municipal and national officials than their male counterparts. However, she suggests that their official “silence”–the absence of general assemblies and frequent publications, as well as their careful cultivation of the traditional, non-threatening image of dames de charité—kept these associations largely out of public view. Furthermore, for the most part, those female associations that did exist lacked visible political and financial clout.

Over the last few decades, scholarship on early medieval conflict has been driven and shaped by the kinds of sources that scholars have used. The different source genres offer their own characteristic pictures of the ways that people processed disputes in the early Middle Ages. Narrative sources, for example, such as chronicles or saints' lives, tend in the process of achieving their narrative orhagiographic goals to highlight violence, extra-judicial settlement, and the ritual or symbolic expression of disputes and disputeresolution. Normative sources, such as law codes or royal legislation (for example, the capitularies issued by Carolingian kings), naturally emphasize institutional tools for handling conflict, such as formal judicial assemblies and judicial procedures, royal judicial officials, and laws. Archival sources from the period consist primarily of charters, that is, records of rights or privilege ranging from diplomas issued by kings and emperors to the property records of churches andmonasteries. These tend to blend the images produced by the first two source genres. Often they record the formal resolution of propertydisputes in judicial assemblies headed by kings, counts, or their representatives; often they refer to laws or imply that the cases theydeal with were covered by some generally recognized set of norms. Charters also, however, provide a great deal of evidence for extra-judicial negotiation and settlement, as well as for ritual and public symbolic communication as a part of dispute processing.

During the first decade of his tenure as dean of Harvard Law School (HLS) from 1870 to 1895, Christopher C. Langdell (1826–1906) produced closely related works on contracts and sales that exercised great influence pedagogically and jurisprudentially. Pedagogically, the casebooks on contracts and sales introduced case method teaching into American legal education. In jurisprudential terms, these works placed Langdell with Frederick Pollock and William R. Anson in England and Oliver W. Holmes, Jr., in the United States, as the leading theorists of contract during its “golden age” of “overwhelming predominance” in Anglo-American law.