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Law & Humanities Blog

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:32 AM PST

Geoffrey Williams, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, has published Trust But Verify: Fraud in Victorian Banking and Its Diminishment. Here is the abstract.

The Victorian banking system was plagued by regular bank failures due to fraud or mismanagement exacerbated by grossly misleading information. In the opinion of informed contemporaries, many banks that did not fail were weakened by fraud. I look at data on the frequency and magnitude of fraud, and show that while it was a minor part of a healthy financial system it was substantially more than fraud in the UK or US in the 20th century; excepting the period after 1878 (the last 23 years of Queen Victoria's 63 year reign), there was the equivalent of Madoff-scale scandal or greater every decade.

I develop a simple model that explains why rational agents might, under limited monitoring, engage in fraud to cover short-term losses in a bank.Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Bracton's Application In the Common Law

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:22 AM PST

Ian Williams, Faculty of Laws, University College London, has published A Medieval Book and Early-Modern Law: Bracton's Authority and Application in the Common Law C.1550-1640 at 79 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Legal History Review 47 (2011). Here is the abstract.

This article considers the place of the thirteenth-century book known as Bracton in the early-modern common law. Using methods from the history of reading, it examines both the uses made of Bracton and the evidence to be found in the surviving copies of the first printed edition. It addresses the impediments to the use of Bracton, the printing of the first edition, the text's readership and its place in the early-modern common-law canon.

The second half of the article identifies topics and material in Bracton which seem to have been of particular interest. Bracton was a recognized source for criminal law and there is some evidence of impact on the law of evidence, servitudes and a little for contract law. An examination of the early-modern law of treason shows that Bracton had an important role in changing the concept of treason from a crime against the monarch to something like the much broader classical crimen laesae maiestatis. The article demonstrates that legal historians should be concerned to identify not only what lawyers read, but how they read it.

Download the article at the link.