47 One of the reasons that Lord Mansfield’s trial notes proved such a valuable source is that, until well into the 19th century, there was no official court reporting in England. By this I mean that the published reports of cases throughout the i8th century, and previously, were merely entrepreneurial activity of individual men who attended the sittings of the courts at Westminster Hall and recorded some or all of the cases to which they listened. Usually the reports were published under each reporter’s name, thus their general description as “the nominative reports”. The quality of the reports and the cases that were selected depended upon the characteristics of the individual reporter. Sometimes no one was in attendance. For example, there are no published reports of decisions of the Court of Common Pleas for the years 1775 to 1788. And even when a reporter was in attendance, there was no assurance that all cases heard would be reported. The famous Lord Campbell, author of Lives of the ChiefJustices and Lives ofthe Lord Chancellors, once reflected on his early days as a court reporter; he recollected: “I had a drawer marked ‘Bad Law,’ into which I threw all the cases which seemed to me to be improperly ruled. What cases Lord Campbell regarded as “bad law” the world will never know, as Campbell did not include themin his reports. Further, the published reports dealt only with “appellate” phases of litigation — arguments on reserved questions of law, on motions for new trials, and the like. These matters were taken up by the courts during one of the four terms, each of three weeks duration, during which the courts were in session in Westminster Hall each year.^ Jury trials, however, were conducted in London in many of the weeks between terms, and sometimes during termin the evenings. Outside of London, jury trials were conducted when the judges travelled on assize to the six circuits twice each year, at Lent and in late summer.^ During and prior to the year to which we direct our attention— 1789 — there was no regular reporting whatever of activity in the English courts at the trial level. One year later, with Peake’s Reports, trial court reporting of civil litigation began, and it continued thereafter, although with some interruptions. To this point, my remarks have been in the nature of background, to indicate the nature of my involvement with the career of Lord Mansfield and to suggest something about the nature of the reporting of decisional law in late 18th-cen- ” 4 years an edition of selected transcriptions from the first Earl’s trial notes. The transcriptions will be grouped by topic, with each topic introduced by an essay describing both the state of English law on that subject, circa 1750, and the contributions made by Lord Mansfield as evidenced in the trial notes. This two-volume work is in press (Studies in Legal History, The University of North Carolina Press). The present paper is an adaptation fromponions of the Introduction to the edition. ■* See Moran, G., The Heralds of the Law, 1948, page 44. The terms were: Michaelmas (November-December), Hilary (approximately February), Easter (March-April) and Trinity (June-July). The exact dates for the four terms varied fromyear to year. Cheney, C.R., Handbook ofDates, 1978, pp. 65—69. See generally Cockburn, J. S., A History ofEnglish Assizes 1558-1714, 1972.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=