English Laws, Global Histories; or, What Makes a Court Supreme? the presidential address Paul D. Halliday, University of Virginia, delivered at the North American Conference on British Studies in November 2021, has now been published open access in the Journal of British Studies. Here is a taste:
–Dan ErnstI will explore a question I've long puzzled over: how might one produce a global history of English laws? We need this history; a global orientation offers the only way to conceive English laws in all their Englishness. I stress English, for the laws of a British empire were peculiarly English. Yet they were also multiform: so much more than indicated by all the maps of common law countries one might find online. We also need this history because understanding English law's extra-English transformations will help us think through any number of problems that people around the globe confront now in the possession and protection of rights in all their forms: substantive and procedural, civil, constitutional, and human.
