On Monday, April 24, 17:00 - 18:30 (GMT), Lorren Eldridge, an Early Career Fellow in Legal History at the University of Edinburgh, will present, via Zoom, some of the findings from her forthcoming book, Law and the Medieval Village Community: Reinvigorating Historical Jurisprudence (Routledge 2023). Register here.
--Dan ErnstHistorical jurisprudence was initially developed into a methodology by late Victorian scholars who were particularly interested in medieval English law. This paper will consider some of the ways they used historical jurisprudence, in which they combined influences from the German Historical School, the Scottish Enlightenment, and English political preoccupations. The approach to the village community in the work of Sir Henry Maine, Frederick W Maitland, and Sir Paul Vinogradoff used this novel method to generate new questions in medieval English law, and in the theoretical understanding of legal personality, individualism, and communalism. This paper will explore some of the research questions they pursued which have enduring interest in modern scholarship.
