In the early 1860s, during his tenure as one of the commissioners working to codify Quebec private law, Augustin-Norbert Morin compiled a lengthy bibliography of foreign works on law and jurisprudence, filled with obscure German titles from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The list contains several hundred alphabetically organized entries over 284 pages and includes a wide variety of authors and periodicals, from prominent names like Savigny, Hugo, Thibaut, Puchta, and Zachariae, to more obscure figures like Johann Brunquel and Georg Friedrich Schutzenberger.

A century has passed since the publication in Germany of a now famous essay on the rights of man by the Heidelberg professor of public law, Georg Jellinek. Over the course of that century, although a “rights revolution” has undoubtedly taken place, numerous practical problems remain in trying to enforce the basic proposition that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Such problems have led one recent commentator to suggest that perhaps the only meaningful defense of human rights is one based on “moral reciprocity” and secular humanism because any attempts to prioritize human rights on either religious grounds, for example, or that of intrinsic human value, are doomed to failure.

The study of changing legal conceptions over time, as they manifest themselves in the day-to-day practice of the courts, has proven to be one of the most rewarding, albeit arduous, areas of inquiry in law history. Court records provide unique insights into an otherwise invisible flow of legal understandings in the past and into common people's sharing or contesting those views. This article, based on the court records of domestic violence and rape in the Arecibo Superior Court from 1860–1895, permits revealing insights into the ways in which these offenses were shaped, as legal concepts, and into magistrates' and common people's constructions of gender. It studies criminal law administration in the Arecibo region and its connections to women. The Arecibo judicial district included nine municipalities on the northern coast and interior of Puerto Rico. Its records comprise a collection of thousands of handwritten documents left in extremely fragile state by humidity and poor conservation. They constitute a very large sample of the judicial work in the region.

As demonstrated in Part I, the question of Chancery reform before 1827 was much debated in party terms and focused largely on Lord Eldon's shortcomings as a decision-maker. After Eldon's departure, it largely ceased to be a party-political issue, although by 1830 law reform in general was firmly on the political agenda. With Eldon gone, there was much common ground on the outlines of Chancery reform. This can be seen from the plan proposed in the Commons by the conservative Sir Edward Sugden in December 1830. Sugden suggested creating a court of appeal for equity, on which the Lord Chancellor, Master of the Rolls, Chief Baron, and Vice Chancellor would sit. He proposed reforms in the masters' offices, under which they would be paid salaries rather than fees, and he wanted masters to sit in open court, with limited judicial functions. He also advocated retrenchment of sinecures and the removal of payment by fees. These ideas were all echoed in the new reformist Chancellor Brougham's proposals for the court, which he elaborated in the spring of 1831.

Michael Lobban shows how dissatisfaction with the law-equity split in English civil justice predated the Judicature Act reforms by two generations at least (one could argue two-and-a half centuries or more—periodization fails quickly). Lobban links the first modern debates over fusion to high legal politics on the one hand and to the more intricate internal problems of evidence, procedure, and jurisdiction on the other. Lawyers of the earlier Victorian age found the Chancery system bequeathed to them by Lord Eldon to be intolerable on two counts: it represented Old Corruption or monopolistic private control of public offices and it exacted heavy costs in procedural inconvenience, cost, and delay. Lobban does not see ideology such as Benthamite philosophy driving the rationalization of Chancery doctrine and institutions though he does not dismiss this factor entirely.

The refrain that law and equity cannot peaceably cohabit the same court is familiar and persistent. In his 1790 treatise on contracts, Joseph Powell protested that blending law and equity was “subversive of first principles.” He claimed, “That a right in itself purely legal cannot be the proper subject of discussion in a jurisdiction purely equitable, and that a right purely equitable, cannot be the proper subject of a purely legal jurisdiction, are axioms that cannot be denied,” adding for good measure: “It is a proposition as self-evident as that black is not red, or white black.” Almost two centuries later, in a provocative 1974 essay called The Death of Contract, Grant Gilmore asserted that the legal doctrine of consideration in contract law and the equitable doctrine of promissory estoppel were like “matter and anti-matter,” and “The one thing that is clear is that these two contradictory propositions cannot live comfortably together: in the end one must swallow the other up.”

As both James Oldham and Joshua Getzler show in their perceptive and helpful comments, much work remains to be done on the history of both the nineteenth-century Chancery and the wider law reform movement. My discussion of the inconclusive nature of the political debate about Eldon's arrears leads Oldham to ask whether the Chancellor was really overburdened and whether the appointment of the Vice Chancellor was as counterproductive as many contemporaries claimed. On the first of these issues, the data show that while Eldon was in general able to deal with the caseload before him, it was in the 1810s—when “by a series of most important decisions, [he] systematized the law of bankruptcy”—that a dramatic arrear in appeals developed (see Figure 5), which contributed to the political pressure on him in the following decade. Oldham shows from a survey of his notebooks that Eldon heard roughly fifty cases a year from 1801–13; while according to official returns, in the 1820s, he heard more than forty appeals each year. But between 1813 and 1819, the number fell to about twelve cases a year. On the second issue, the data show that the creation of a Vice Chancellor did have an impact, but a relatively modest one. Lacking the distractions of the Great Seal, he could hear more original business; and cases set down and heard in Chancery increased by about 40 percent in the decade and a half after his appointment. While the number of appeals also increased, both numerically and proportionally, they remained at manageable levels.

The attitudes of medieval people toward Sundays and Holy Days have always been of interest to historians. They have been studied from at least five different perspectives. Max Levy, for instance, explained how Sunday developed from a day that commemorated Christ's resurrection, but was originally a working day (dies dominica), to a day of worship, contemplation, and rest. Initially no (servile) work was allowed, but exceptions were accepted because of necessity, like harvest work, or because of good intentions, like concern for the common good or for a pious cause. Others looked at the stance of the Church, analyzing the protests against the non-observance of Holy Days as well as the objections raised to the observance of Holy Days from the clergy or from laymen, or concentrated mainly on the work ban and its implications for working life in the Middle Ages. Willard and Haskett studied the observance of Sundays and Holy Days in government departments like the Lower Exchequer or the Chancery to see to what extent the working of the English government was affected. Legal historians, however, have not shown much interest in how the courts observed Sundays and Holy Days, mainly because everything seemed to have been settled since the late thirteenth century. Paul Brand recently stated that it had “clearly become the general practice by the second half of the reign of Edward I for the Common Bench and King's Bench not to sit on Sundays,” or on All Saints Day (1 November), All Souls Day (2 November), the feast of the Purification (2 February), Ascensiontide, and the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (24 June), all of which fell within term time.