The importance of voluntary associations is apparent to all who study the development of American society in the nineteenth century. Observations made by the perceptive nineteenth-century traveler Alexis de Tocqueville have become an obligatory cliché in historical writing on the subject:

Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,… but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

Since the last century canon-legal historians and, more recently, social historians have examined a variety of questions concerning the social and legal aspects of marriage in the later medieval period. Particular significance has been given to the synthesis by Alexander III of existing sacramental and legal opinion concerning marriage in the twelfth century. His synthesis produced a doctrine in which marriage was viewed as a purely consensual union. Any two legally entitled adults could contract marriage by words of mutual consent. A twofold distinction existed in the nature and intent of these words. On the one hand, a binding and immediately effective union was created through the exchange of words of present consent (per verba de praesenti). Neither publicity, nor church solemnization, nor indeed consummation added anything to the validity and permanence of such a contract. On the other hand, a promise to marry was expressed by words of future consent (per verba de futuro), which might be terminated by the agreement of the parties or by a subsequent de praesenti contract. If, however, a de futuro contract was followed by intercourse, it took upon itself the legal mantle of a de praesenti contract, and what was initially only a promise to marry was transformed into a binding marriage.

Little scholarly attention has been paid to the role of Scots law in the development of the post-Revolutionary law and legal system of the United States. This neglect stems largely from the fact that Scots law has had little apparent permanent influence on American law. However, during the “formative era of American law” from the Revolution to the Civil War, a notable effort to introduce America to civil law concepts took place. Furthermore, the impact of the Scottish enlightenment on the fledgling United States in higher education, philosophy, and medicine is well documented. Scottish Enlightenment thought arguably had a significant impact on the Declaration of Independence, which was signed by at least two native-born Scots and an American who was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.

Three themes crucial to understanding eighteenth-century British history converge when one writes about the country attorney: the professions, which had a remarkable development in Georgian England; the rural practitioner as distinct from his urban, principally London, counterpart about whom much more has been written; and the local economy in which attorneys performed as conveyancers, money lenders, managers of landed properties, copyhold court holders, and clerks—for justices of the peace, at the assizes, on turnpike, enclosure, and drainage commissions, for charities, and for law and order associations. Popular literature notwithstanding, country attorneys were not so often knaves using their skills to cheat unwitting clients as indispensable cogs in the rural economy where they served the interests of the landholding classes.

By the common law rules of inheritance women in English landed society fell into two classes. Some were altogether excluded from inheriting; others were entitled to succeed to the family estate. The woman thus entitled, the heiress-at-law, is clearly a figure due historical attention. Yet she has never been singled out for long-term consideration. Where she has been the main subject, discussion has always been chronologically limited, and her history has not been carried any distance through the course of legal changes that are relevant to it. Usually she has been discussed as but part of the family, and attention has been focussed largely on eldest sons and their relations with younger children, with younger sons or with daughters not heiresses, as the case may be. To focus on the heiress and to follow her history over the long run, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, is the purpose of this article.

The central institutions of the Florentine criminal law system in the early fifteenth century were still the medieval courts of the three foreign rectors, the Podestà, the Captain of the People, and the Executor of the Ordinances of Justice, just as they had been throughout the fourteenth century. Similarly, criminal trials were conducted using inquisition procedure just as they had been from the late thirteenth century. Important changes, however, had taken place and were continuing to take place in the offices of the rectors and in inquisition procedure that greatly enhanced the effectiveness of this system. The fortuitous confluence of a strong state with improvements in inquisition procedure and the court system led to a strongly self-reliant court system that could, for the first time in the early fifteenth century, fully implement inquisition procedure by arresting criminals in flagranti, initiating cases through public initiation, gathering evidence independently, compelling witnesses, and successfully convicting. Because the political and social atmosphere influenced the effectiveness and the philosophies of prosecution of the criminal law system, a study of this system must include some consideration of political and social influences. Conversely, a study of the judicial system supplies a great deal of evidence about the government and society. When this interrelated sphere is regarded as a whole, the early fifteenth century is seen to be dominated by three closely related developments: the full implementation of inquisition procedure; the continued development of the territorial state, which made this possible; and the struggle between republican institutions and the nascent oligarchy.