David Sugarman In short, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in English legal science and education. The forms of action and the separate administration of equity and common law disappeared. Jurists and judges took advantage of the space this afforded to reconstruct and systematise the common lawin the formof a body of rights. The new, professional, university law teachers constituted torts, constitutional law, contract law, criminal law, international law, jurisprudence, etc., etc., as we knowthem, in collaboration with their German and American counterparts. This period of unprecedented juristic law-making - of systematisation, conceptualisation, exposition and simplification - was a truly cosmopolitan enterprise. Above all, the latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed the production of a new generation of treatises for law students and lawyers. The medium was indeed the message: the law was internally coherent, characterised by general principles and, through simplicity, a celebration of judges and lawvers. Here were the true codifications of nineteenth century England. But all this is the subject of another paper.Inthis paper, I have tried: 1) To indicate the strengths and weaknesses of Weber on the English. 2) To point to some of the ways in which the hitherto “separate” and different debates within history and within Weber on the peculiarities of the English might usefully engage with one another. 3) To demonstrate the need to take the union between rationality and irrationality more seriously; and in so doing, I have questioned several of the basic polarities and assumptions that underpin much historical and sociological work. 4) To counsel that greater care should be taken when using the concept of national peculiarities. 5) To advocate the value of empirical assessment as well as exegesis. 262 I have concentrated on Weber’s discussion of the English because despite its deficiencies, like all Weber’s work, it is wonderfully rich and suggestive. It has also not received the kind of detailed attention lavished upon other aspects of Weber’s work. It was because of this neglect, and because of its endless fascination, that suggested it as a subject for this paper. See Sugerman, “Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind and the Making of the Textbook Tradition”, op. at. passim. 189
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