In the handbook for Cypriot police officers published in 1896 by the island's British colonial administration, there is a passage that appears at first innocuous but that had important resonances for the development of legal and political statuses in Cyprus of the period. Under the section “Police Duties” and the subheading “Constables,” the handbook notes that “[c]onstables are expected to possess such knowledge of the inhabitants of their District as to enable them readily to recognize them. They are to be instructed to watch unceasingly all persons having no visible means of support, and obtain knowledge of all suspected thieves, idle and disorderly persons, and disorderly houses.”

After a period of Mongolian rule during the Yüan Dynasty (1279–1368), the first Ming emperor, T'ai-tsu, tried to build a new empire on a solid footing. From the start, he paid a lot of attention to legislation as a means of guaranteeing stability in the empire. The emperor's concern for stability resulted in an imperial decree stipulating that the Ming Code, established and adapted under his supervision, had to remain unchanged for the remainder of the dynasty. As social and economic evolutions called for modifications in the Ming legislation, a way had to be found to introduce these changes. This article examines how a number of so-called “precedents,” relating to dissolution of marriage and engagement on the initiative of women and their natal families, were proposed and adopted during the mid-Ming period. By looking into the individual proposals, we will try to find the specific problems that threatened a consistent application and enforcement of these precedents.

After the rise to dominance of the neo-classical school in economics in the 1920s and 1930s, legal historians manifested very little interest in economic theory. After the cliometric revolution of the early 1960s, most legal historians expressed declining interest in economic historians. After the rise of Critical Legal History and cultural legal history in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many legal historians showed diminishing interest in the economy. This trend was augmented by the expansion of law and economics as a leading jurisprudence and methodology within the law schools. Most legal historians viewed themselves as part of a camp in the law schools, whether of the humanities oriented scholars, of post modernists, or of critical scholars, who were antagonists of the law and economics camp. These legal historians often identified all economists with law and economics and further disassociated themselves from economic historians. Ironically, the less legal historians consider economic history, economic theory, and the economy itself as relevant to their purposes, the more economic historians are discovering the relevancy of the law and of legal history to theirs. This article suggests to legal historians that the time is ripe to revisit economic history and theory and to reconsider their long-established indifference toward them.

The object of this article is to draw attention to an area of European legal history that I think deserves more investigation. It is the change in legal practice caused by the transition from the diffused, undifferentiated, customary law of the earlier middle ages to the various forms of expert, esoteric, professional law that dominated the higher courts of the later middle ages. The suggestion that this has not been much studied may seem odd but, though much has been written on the new study of Roman law, those who work on it have tended to concentrate on the intellectual achievements of the glossators and post-glossators, rather than on practice. Practice in canon law has received more attention, notably from legal historians trained in the Anglo-American tradition, but this has not focused closely on twelfth-century origins. The beginnings of English common law have also been much studied and, since it started off as largely a matter of procedures, that has indeed meant looking at practice. The traditional teleology of legal history has, however, prevented much cross-fertilization with the history of other legal systems. One example of the consequent detachment of English legal history is the assumption of some English legal historians that Roman law procedures were followed in what they often characterize simply as “the Continent” more generally and earlier than seems to have been the case in most areas north of the Alps. Both in England and elsewhere many legal historians concentrate on the period from the thirteenth century on, when sources become more plentiful. Meanwhile, social historians of early medieval western Europe, including England, have argued—to my mind successfully, though I am hardly unprejudiced—that early medieval law was not just a weak, ritualized, and irrational response to feuds and violence, but their investigations tend to stop before the professionals took over. The result is that, apart from recent pioneering work on twelfth-century Tuscany by Chris Wickham, the transition in court practice outside England has been neglected.

Susan Reynolds's article is a culmination and a turning point. It builds on several approaches to medieval law and culture, of which two strike me as especially important. One is a study of legal history as a domain of human activity, especially habitual or routine activity, pursued by a wide range of social groups. The other is a search for the meaning and the criteria of the enormous transition during the central Middle Ages, which Christopher Dawson at the dawn of this subject, and Robert Bartlett in its currently definitive moment, have identified as “the making of Europe.” The first subject exists above all thanks to the work of Reynolds herself, while the second is an outcome of a number of quite distinct scholarly trajectories, spanning several generations. Apart from some suggestive and implicit links, those two subjects have, over the past quarter century, been pursued separately. Reynolds's article brings them together.

As I understand it, Susan Reynolds's article is meant to address the longstanding habit among legal historians of equating professional approaches to the law with the emergence of a school-based study of Roman law. In the course of the twelfth century, she argues, legal practitioners developed their own kinds of expertise that, though less bookish, might have had a practical significance equal to, if not greater than, the learning produced in the schools. Although these observations seem on the mark for Europe north of the Alps, Reynolds errs, I think, in assimilating Italy to this chronological and conceptual schema. Already by the ninth and tenth centuries, there existed in northern Italy a corps of royal notaries and judges who possessed both literacy and legal expertise unparalleled elsewhere in Europe. Distinguished from other laymen by their titles, learning, and even their handwriting, the legal experts already appear to have met the criteria of professionalism generally proposed for the late twelfth century in the rest of Europe.

Susan Reynolds has written a typically wide-ranging, and thought-provoking, article about the process of transition from what she calls “the diffused, undifferentiated, customary law” that was characteristic of Western Europe in the early medieval period to the various different forms of “professional law” that were characteristic of the higher courts of Western Europe in the later middle ages. This is a process that she characterizes, surely correctly, as an “important stage of legal history,” for it was only as an end result of this process of transformation that there emerged law courts and legal procedures and substantial bodies of legal rules that are recognizably the distant ancestors of their modern European and American counterparts. It was also this process of transformation that changed for ever the relationship between law and the society that this law regulated and in which it was embedded in Western European societies. Her article makes no claim to be a definitive study of this process. It is more a pointer to the work that still needs to be done to enable full transnational comparisons to be made between the different ways the process happened within different legal systems and between the different systems that were created through these changes. She does, nonetheless, state some tentative conclusions and point to what she sees as some of the prime factors in bringing about the transformation.

Readers who look forward to a fierce debate may be in for a disappointment, as I find myself more or less in agreement with most of the points the three commentators have made about my article. I am grateful to them for the attention they have given it and for their pertinent and constructive comments.

On March 5, 1824, Henry St. George Tucker was elected by the General Assembly of Virginia to be the judge of the circuit superior court of chancery to sit in Winchester and Clarksburg. Tucker had built up a very successful law practice in Winchester, where he had settled in 1802 upon his admission to the bar. He had also built up a large family; he had six sons and two daughters as well as three children who died young. The elevation to the bench resulted in an increase in professional status, but it also resulted in a substantial decrease in income. In order to remedy this financial development without ethical prejudice to his professional development, he opened a law school. This solution was, no doubt, an obvious one, as his father, the eminent Judge St. George Tucker, had done the same in 1790, when he became the professor of law and police in the College of William and Mary.