Petrach detested lawyers. The story of his experience of law is familiar. In 1316 Petrarch, then twelve years old, was sent by his father to study law, first in Montpellier, then in Bologna, the oldest center of Roman law studies in Europe. Bologna entranced him in some ways; there were great law teachers there, he latter wrote, who were like the ancients themselves returned to life. Nevertheless, if he looked up to some of his teachers, his studies in Bologna taught Petrarch to despise the general soullessness and avarice of fourteenth-century lawyers. Lawyers, he later wrote, cared nothing for antiquity and everything for money: to them “everything is for sale.” It was not, he assured readers of his Epistle to Posterity, that he found the subject too difficult. On the contrary, “many asserted that I would have done very well if I had persisted in my course. Neverthesless I dropped that study entirely as soon as my parents' supervision was removed. Not because I disliked the power and authority of Roman law, which are undoubtedly very great, or its saturation with Roman antiquity, which I love; but because men, in their wickedness, pervert Roman law when they employ it.” Appalled by what he had seen, he gave up law for more honorable pursuits.

In the parliament held at Leicester in the spring of 1414, King Henry V was confronted with a long list of grievances on the part of the common folk of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland. A formal petition decried the contempt with which the terms of truces made with Scotland and royal letters of safe conduct were treated. The commons further complained that men of the liberties of Tynedale, Redesdale, and Hexham daily committed “many murders, treasons, homicides … robberies, and other misdeeds,” and that “some of the said persons shelter and support many people of Scotland, counselling and comforting [them] in their robbery and despoiling.” Finally, they said, in contravention of the terms of the truce, men of Scotland “also take them prisoner, keeping them … until they make ransom of their own volition, all this with the aid, assent and comfort of the said persons so enfranchised.”

Education in law in the Scottish universities has a continuous history only from the early eighteenth century. In 1707, the regius professorship of public law and the law of nature and nations was founded in Edinburgh, to be followed in 1710 and 1722 by professorships in civil (Roman) and Scots law respectively. In the University of Glasgow, the regius professorship of civil law was established in late 1713 and first filled in 1714. These developments were not entirely novel. Throughout the seventeenth century, there had been regular, if unsuccessful, attempts to create university chairs in law. While the background to the foundation of the university chairs requires further careful study, we may note that, by at least around 1690, it was thought desirable to introduce the teaching of both civil and Scots law, though the notion of teaching both does go back at least as far as the First Book of Discipline of 1561. After the visitation of the University of Edinburgh that resulted from the political and religious settlements of 1688–89, it was proposed to establish a single professorship to teach both civil and Scots law. This proposal in the late seventeenth century is in line with general developments throughout Europe. Nothing, however, was done, probably because no person or body was willing to finance a chair.

My subject is the story of the entry of lawyers into the English criminal courts and their impact on trial procedure. Until the eighteenth century lawyers played little part in the trial of felonies in England—in the trial, that is, of those accused of the most serious offenses, including murder, rape, arson, robbery, and virtually all forms of theft. Indeed, the defendants in such cases were prohibited at common law from engaging lawyers to act for them in court. In the case of less-serious crimes—misdemeanors—defendants were allowed counsel; and those accused of high treason, the most serious offense of all, were granted the right to make their defense by counsel in 1696. But not in felony. Accused felons might seek a lawyer's advice on points of law, but if they wanted to question the prosecution evidence or to put forward a defense, they had to do that on their own behalf. The victim of a felony (who most often acted as the prosecutor in a system that depended fundamentally on private prosecution) was free to hire a lawyer to manage the presentation of his or her case. But in fact few did so. The judges were generally the only participants in felony trials with professional training. They dominated the courtroom and orchestrated the brief confrontation between the victim and the accused that was at the heart of the trial.

Accompanying the national move to create a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and the commemoration of anniversaries of important episodes in the modern civil rights movement, has come a welcome literature by historians, political scientists, sociologists, journalists, and movement participants analyzing and interpreting the movement. Considerable attention has naturally focused on the Montgomery bus boycott that signaled the start of the modern civil rights movement in December, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. These recent works have reaffirmed the traditional interpretation of the boycott: Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and sustained by the sacrifices of the thousands who refrained from using public buses, the boycott proved that, by acting collectively, an African-American community could demand and obtain an end to segregation. The technique of nonviolent resistance to oppression, it is said, successfully integrated Montgomery buses.

The penal colony of New South Wales was founded in January, 1788, with a population of convicts, military people, and a few civil officers. The settlement displaced one of the oldest cultures on earth, as English law failed to recognize that the Aborigines had any right to the land they had occupied for 40,000 years. On their first night ashore the women convicts were greeted by mass debauchery that deserved to be recorded by Hogarth, all under a heavy thunderstorm.

The first amendment prohibits Congress from making any law that abridges the right of the people “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This clause reflects many years of practical experience with petitions, both in England and in the American colonies. Unlike the right of free speech, which has attracted much scholarly attention, the right of petition has received little scrutiny from commentators or judges. The scope of the substantive right embodied in the clause is still a matter of dispute.

This article explores a key incident in the history of the right of petition—the congressional imposition in the 1830s of a “gag rule” to prohibit the reception of petitions related to slavery. This restriction on petitions was a turning point both for a change in the meaning of the right and for the procedures permitted by Congress to give it expression. The gag rule effectively quashed the right to petition as it had been exercised for centuries—as a means of communicating the people's grievances to government. Although the right still exists, its traditional usage and meaning “disappeared” in the 1830s.

Two generations of legal historians have debated the question of the reception and evolution of common law and equity in England and America by jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Briefly, one school argues that jurists of these years employed a “doctrinal method” to discover, through deduction, the principles of the law in a particular case. Such a jurist, in the words of the late Lon Fuller, “does not consider that it is the primary function of judges or legal scholars to weigh the practical consequences of deciding a particular case one way or the other. Rather [he] regards them as having a purely deductive function. The starting point for the deciding of any case is to be found in certain premises dictated by the nature of law and legal relationships. Each relationship or transaction has its ‘essential nature.’”