The relationship between the jurisdictions of local courts and central courts in late-medieval and early-modern England remains largely unexplored. It is nevertheless important to an understanding of the development of the common law, because of the prevailing notion that the great increase in litigation in the royal courts in the early Tudor period was connected with a decline in the use made of local courts. A massive transfer of business to the centralised royal courts might have affected the common law in ways other than the purely numerical, in that it could have brought a reception of legal ideas and remedies already well known out in the country. On that footing, the appearance of new kinds of action in the central courts at this period may represent transfers of jurisdiction rather than changes in legal thinking.

In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives was persuaded by a mathematician (of sorts) to entertain a bill “introducing a new mathematical truth”. The new truth was a method, or more precisely methods, for computing the value of π. Since π is a transcendental number the methods could at best have achieved an approximation. In fact they yielded several inaccurate values, one as wild as 4. The legislators were doubtful enough to refer the bill to a committee (the Committee on Canals) and, when this reported favourably, to the Committee on Temperance. Eventually they had the sense to defer it sine die.