The Common Law Tradition: Lawyers, Books and the Law

by John Hamilton Baker

Legal history is not merely a history of particular events but also a history of traditions, intellectual and institutional. The Common Law Tradition is about the learned traditions which have shaped the common law and the English legal mind over the the profession, its structure, its technical language and its literature. J.H. Baker also looks at central institutions, such as the inns of court and chancery, and at local courts, which operated on the fringes of the common law, early conveyancing courses, the origins of law reporting and the first identifiable English year-book reporter. There is an account of the short-lived practice of reporting criminal cases at Newgate in the early fourteenth century and a suggestion that the spread of law reporting on the continent of Europe was begun by Englishmen serving in the fourteenth-century curia at Avignon.

448 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2003

About the author

Sir John Hamilton Baker is a Professor on the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. He has also been a Barrister (Inner Temple and Gray's Inn) and an Honorary Bencher (Inner Temple).

He writes on English legal history, especially in the early-modern period: history of the legal profession and the inns of court and manuscript law reports and readings.