Legal History, the Common Lawand “Englishness” While hostility to Roman lawplayed a larger part in English legal and politleal history than did admiration for it, scholarship has nonetheless stressed the importance of Roman-Civilian ideas within English legal culture. The work of Hclmholz and others have defended English civilians against Maitland’s charge of insularity and have shown that they were indeed abreast of Continental ideas. This is an important point, though one wonders whether Maitland would have been flabbergasted to find civilians utilising the materials of the Civil law. During the Enlightenment, law had a strongly cosmopolitan foundation and inter-disciplinary complexion. In England, cultural and legal borrowings and transplants were systematically acknowledged. With respect to the nineteenth century, Brian Simpson has demonstrated how common lawyers appropriated the ideas of Continental jurists, notably, Pothier and Savigny, to renovate English private law. One might take this a good deal further. The revival of legal science and university legal education in England, the United States and Continental Europe during the period 1850-1914 was in part a transnational affair involving jurists in England, Germany, France and the United States corresponding with one another to construct a liberal legal science. Of particular importance was the German model of legal science, notably the influence of Savigny, which was substantial. English jurists such as Austin, Maine, Pollock, Holland, Bryce and Maitland were signally influenced by German legal thought.'-^ Indeed, one might argue that Austin and the so-called English school of jurisprudence that he founded was a myth; that there was no English school of jurisprudence but rather a German one.*'^ And that fromabout 1870 to 1914, the possibilities of developing a less insular, more comparativist conception of legal science and legal history were exceptionally propitious. Welcome though this work is, however, it only takes one so far. No doubt English lawyers read foreign books; but to what end? In his recent reassessment of “the Common Law Mind”, in the light of recent historical research, Pocock contends that: “There are two kinds of ‘insularity’ ... Englishmen may have been so thoroughly insular as to know nothing whatever about law outside their part of the island; alternatively, they could have known a good deal about other systems of law and yet maintained the ‘insular’ conviction that no law but common law had ever obtained in England.” (P. 262.) It is this second meaning that is central to the common law mind. Here is an important reason why the common law mind has tended to discourage a breadth of vision, notably, a thoroughgoing 221 by unusual, though they were not no means Grazi.\dci, Michele. “Changing Images of the Law in Xix Century English Legal Thought (the Continental Impulse).” In The Reception of Continental Ideas in the Common Latv World JS20—1920, edited hv Mathias Reimann (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1993) 115-64. '■* Lobban, Michael. “Was There a Nineteenth Century “English School of Jurisprudence”?” Journal of Legal History 16 (1995): 34-62.
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