During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the English Court of Requests played a substantial role within the sphere of the parallel and competing jurisdictions of the Westminster courts. It served as a jack-of-all-trades court, a court of last resort, and a quasi-appellate forum in which a certain subset of litigants could have their cases heard or reheard in what they apparently considered to be a more favorable venue. Admiralty disputes made up a small but not insignificant part of the Court’s docket from the beginning. This chapter details the types of admiralty disputes heard in Requests and the various ways litigants used the Court.
Monday, December 5, 2016
Kadens on the Court of Requests
Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law, has posted The Admiralty Jurisdiction of the Court of Requests, which appears in Texts and Contexts in Legal History: Essays in Honor of Charles Donahue, ed. John Witte, Jr., Sara McDougall, Anna di Robilant, 349-66 (Robbins Collection 2016):
