Sometimes we are least aware of that which most affects us. So it seems with respect to legal categories. Lawyers do not take legal categories very seriously today. But they should. Legal categories are central to legal reasoning; indeed it is almost impossible to imagine legal reasoning without the use of categories. Categorical thinking affects every area of law. In constitutional law, for example, equal protection analysis turns crucially on categories of affected interests. Specialists in landlord-tenant law debate whether the implied covenant of habitability is a property doctrine or a contract doctrine. And if the public/private distinction is dead, as some reports have suggested, it rules us yet from its grave. Legal categories are not simply housekeeping devices. They inhibit our imagination of what is acceptable, indeed, of what is possible. They take on a quality of givenness and thereby disempower us. We can retain control over categories, and ultimately over our own legal imagination, only by reminding ourselves that we have created them and are capable of remaking them.

In September of 1953, eight months before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas would be decided, the Topeka Board of Education voted to abolish segregation in its schools. Some Topekans thought it curious that the school board would vote to abolish segregation when its case defending segregation was pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. When Edward Goss of the Topeka Civic Club asked the board why it hadn't waited for the Court's decision, board member Harold Conrad responded: ‘We feel that segregation is not an American practice.’

This paper is an account of the development of marine insurance in Scotland. The topic has not been previously investigated by either legal or economic historians. While providing a general history of the development of insurance, this paper will also undertake three more specific tasks, (1) to increase knowledge about the use of marine insurance during this time, particularly during the period 1700–1750; (2) to explain why insurance was not commonly used by merchants during the seventeenth century; and (3) to correct one very serious and misleading error relating to the chronology of development.

It hardly needs to be said that public opinion is much agitated by the problem of crime. Polls show that people rank crime as one of the most serious issues facing society. A constantly growing amount of effort and research has gone into the question of what to do about crime. It is only natural that the interest in crime should spill over into many disciplines, including history, though, until recently, very few studies focussed on this chapter of social history and only a handful of these were quantitative. The number of such studies is now starting to grow.

This paper starts from charters. It may even be regarded as an attempt to trace and explain the rise and development of express warranty clauses in English private documents, an exercise in diplomatic. The main stimulus behind the investigation is, however, something quite different: the challenge of understanding English law before the advent of a common law. I want my explanations to be consistent not merely with the social relations that produced the charters, but also with the mental terms in which they were thought out and interpreted, their legal context.

So portentous a title as I have contrived for tonight's lecture ought to come furnished with an appropriately bombastic beginning. In fact, it does not. Instead of concentrating on a beginning, I thought that we might more profitably focus our attention on the beginning, that is, on a time long before the sophisticated legal/administrative system of England's high middle ages had evolved. It will be interesting to get what peeks we can at the jurisprudential assumptions of, say, preconquest Englishmen. As Tom Green has recently demonstrated in his book on the criminal jury, these assumptions could exhibit a durability that had functional consequences for many centuries. If through the jury they could prevail against contrary official versions of what the substantive law was, as Green has shown, how much more potent could they be when the government was not inclined to oppose their effectuation?

All historical sources reflect reality in a partial and distorted way. The past, therefore, can be understood only when the limitations of particular sources are recognized and the methods employed in making historical observations, as well as the observations themselves, are constantly tested and refined. Drs. Poos and Smith, in an earlier issue of the Law and History Review, have undertaken such a task when they thoroughly examined my use of manorial court rolls' data for demographic analysis of a medieval English parish.

In my book The Evolution of Law I sought to give a general theory of legal evolution based on detailed legal examples from which generalizations could be drawn, offering as few examples as were consistent with my case in order to present as clear a picture as possible. I was well aware as I was writing that some critics would regard the examples as mere isolated aberrations and for them and for other readers who, whether convinced of the thesis or not, would like further evidence, I want here to bring forward a few extra significant examples.