Legal History, the Common Lawand “Englishness” As George Orwell observed in his famous essay on boys’ weeklies, published in 1939, foreigners in boys’ magazines had long been portrayed as onedimensional stereotypes thus: “Frenchman: Excitable. Wears beard. Gesticulates wildly. Spaniard/Mexican etc.: Sinister. Treacherous. Chinese: Sinister, treacherous, wears pigtail. Italian: Excitable. Grinds barrel organ or carries stiletto. Swede/Dane etc.: Kindhearted, stupid ... 215 ”5 Legal discourse contributed to such sterotypes. Two late nineteenth century examples will have to suffice. The first is fromSir Frederic Pollock’s Inaugural Lecture delivered in Oxford in October 1883: “Rude and obscure in its beginnings, unobserved or despised by the doctors and glossators, there rose in this island a home-grown stock of laws and a home-grown type of legal institutions. They grewin rugged exclusiveness, disdaining fellowship with the more polished learning of the civilians, and it is well that they did so ... In law, as in politics, the severance of Britain ... from the world of Rome has fostered a new birth which mankind could ill have spared. And the growth of English politics is more closely connected with the independent growth and strength of English lawthan has been commonly perceived, or can be gathered fromthe common accounts of English history ... We stand, then, in a special and marked relation to the comparative and historical study of laws by the mere fact that our own laws are insular. But they are more than insular; they have become the law of half a world; already they compare for the extent of their influence on men’s affairs with the law of the Roman Empire ... Our long standing apart fromthe general movement of European thought has had its drawbacks; but I think it the better opinion that both in jurisprudence and in ... philosophy the gain has outweighed them.”^ The second example is from the work of another leading Oxford jurist, Albert Venn Dicey: “Foreign observers of English manners ... have been far more struck than have Englishmen themselves with the fact that England is a country governed, as is scarcely any other part of Europe, under the rule of law... [Even] if we confine our observation to the existing condition of Europe, we shall soon be convinced that the “rule of law” ... is peculiar to England ... [and] those countries which, like the United States of America, have inherited English traditions. In almost every continental community the executive exercises far wider discreRichards, Jeffrey- Films and British National Identity p. 13 and n. 28. ^ Pollock, Frederic, “English Opportunities in Historical and Comparative Jurisprudence” in his Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses, (London: Macmillan, 1890) pp. 47-48 and 25 (being an Inaugural Lecture delivered in Oxford in October 1883).
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