Jurists lacked the public role in England which they enjoyed on the continent.The English jurist’s position was far from that of the Prussian, who might aspire to write works which would guide the courts in their application of the law,might be consulted by the courts on specific legal points, or might even hope to become Minister of Justice. Firstly, there was no Ministry of Justice in England: instead, matters of law reform were left to the Lord Chancellor, who combined his ministerial functions with being the head of the Court of Chancery. Law reform, as we have seen, was treated by these men as largely confined to institutional and procedural reforms, though Lords Brougham and Cranworth did make efforts towards recasting the law into the form of a code. As the main judge in the Chancery, the Lord Chancellor did play a central role in the development of equity jurisprudence. Strong Chancellors - such as Lord Eldon - were able to exert a very strong influence in shaping and defining the law in this area. But they were almost without exception men who did not write legal treatises. Only Edward Sugden, who became Lord Chancellor (as Lord St. Leonards) for ten months in1852, was a prolific writer; but his many books were manuals aimed at the practitioner, rather than theoretical and systematic treatises of law. Secondly, judges did not take their law from treatises. In a continental setting, where there were many judges to apply the law, but relatively few great jurists to explain and analyze it, the role of the jurist could be a strong one. But in England, the reverse was the case. Judges were few in number.There were only fifteen common law judges in 1875, and seven on the equity side.These men handled all the business of the superior courts of law. This was a world where the shared learning and oral tradition of the judges still counted for much.The law was made up of their decisions and those of their predecessors: it was not regarded as a matter for the speculation of treatise writers. As the nineteenth century progressed, so treatise writers and legal commentators did have an increasingly large role to play.This was for at least three reasons. Firstly, the nineteenth century saw a significant expansion of case law, after the mid-eighteenth century lull.More cases re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 144 en’s College, Birmingham, in the 1850s,’ American Journal of Legal History 33 (1989) 241-87, C.W. Brooks and M. Lobban, ‘Apprenticeship or Academy? The Idea of a Law University1830-1860’, in J. Bush and A.Wijffels, Learning the Law:Teaching and theTransmission of Law in England, 1150-1900 (London, 1999), pp. 353-82, and J. H. Baker, Legal Education in London 1250-1850 (London: Selden Society, 2007).
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