This article tries to answer two questions about the writ of covenant that have perplexed legal historians. Maitland noticed that the common law courts adopted a requirement that plaintiff produce a writing of the covenant under defendant's seal as proof of the covenant. When and why royal officials adopted this requirement continue to be the chief unanswered questions about covenant. Second, there is the matter of remedy. Some legal historians believe that the remedy in covenant changed from specific performance to damages. But what was the remedy in covenant? Did it change? If so, when and why did it change?

When industrial schools were initially proposed in late nineteenth-century Canada, they were perceived to be a common solution for the neglected and delinquent working-class boy of the urban slums and for the Aboriginal boy in need of similar education, discipline, and moral and vocational training. This undertaking briefly encapsulated the twinned aims of Canada's nation-building project: to civilize and acculturate both the poor and the colonized to middle-class, Western, white and Anglo norms. As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff remark of nineteenth-century British imperialism, the taming of the “uncivilised and immoral” indigenous African and British slum dweller were overlapping projects, with the “primitive and the pauper” seen as “one in spirit. …the sacred task of the colonizing mission was to reconstruct the home lives of both” by inculcating in their daily lives the bourgeois values of “modern domesticity.”

In 1916, Charles Anderson Boston, one of the members of the first national Legal Redress Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, spoke at the organization's board of directors meeting to endorse the use of new litigation strategies in the fight against racial segregation. The “proper presentation of the legal fight against segregation,” Boston urged, should focus on gathering “facts, not law” to demonstrate to the courts the law's “actual operation.”; Boston's emphasis on using facts to demonstrate the law's operation accorded with the NAACP's litigation strategy, which relied not only on gathering and presenting such facts but also on creating facts by carefully staging scenarios that would present the right test cases to the courts for adjudication.

Susan Carle has given us a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and well-argued examination of the early history of the modern civil rights movement. She frames her inquiry of this rarely investigated period in terms of the tension between the NAACP's litigation tactics during the early part of the twentieth century and the professed ethics of the establishment lawyers who authored and approved these controversial measures. How, she asks, could leading corporate lawyers such as Charles Boston justify authorizing the NAACP's concerted campaign to solicit plaintiffs and create test cases while at the same time serving on ethics committees that expressly condemned such practices?

I was delighted to receive David Wilkins's kind comments about my article. Wilkins provides a cogent and pithy analysis of the relationship between the public interest and elite corporate bars. In so doing, he uses my article as a springboard for proposing a thesis more ambitious and general than mine, involving several propositions concerning what he terms the “odd alliance” and “enduring relationship” between elite corporate and public interest lawyers. Wilkins states that this alliance is related to: (1) the similar class origins of these two kinds of lawyers; (2) public interest lawyers' tendency to target defendants who do not threaten the interests of corporate lawyers' powerful clients; and (3) the class interests of the elite bar in bolstering an image of the legal profession as devoted to the pursuit of justice. On all of these topics, I have many points of agreement with Wilkins. I do, however, perceive some differences, which I will very briefly sketch in the limited space allotted me here.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold “the laws of Edgar” during his reign. The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut. The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century. Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, the Instituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, and Quadripartitus. The Leges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as the Quadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.