Book contents
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Every Common Reader”
- Chapter 2 Perpendicular Publics
- Chapter 3 Ambivalence, Survival, and Law in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
- Chapter 4 The Court of Justice and the Court of Conscience
- Chapter 5 “A Higher Tribunal”
- Chapter 6 Mansfield, Burrow, and the Reformulation of the Legal Decision
- Chapter 7 Novel Subjects
- Chapter 8 Common Law and Cultural Difference in Scott’s Ivanhoe and Chronicles of the Canongate
- Chapter 9 The Legal Character of Paupers in Early Nineteenth-Century England
- Chapter 10 Liberty in “Parenthesis”
- Chapter 11 Yearning for Restriction in the Romantic Novel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Mansfield, Burrow, and the Reformulation of the Legal Decision
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
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Book contents
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 “Every Common Reader”
- Chapter 2 Perpendicular Publics
- Chapter 3 Ambivalence, Survival, and Law in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year
- Chapter 4 The Court of Justice and the Court of Conscience
- Chapter 5 “A Higher Tribunal”
- Chapter 6 Mansfield, Burrow, and the Reformulation of the Legal Decision
- Chapter 7 Novel Subjects
- Chapter 8 Common Law and Cultural Difference in Scott’s Ivanhoe and Chronicles of the Canongate
- Chapter 9 The Legal Character of Paupers in Early Nineteenth-Century England
- Chapter 10 Liberty in “Parenthesis”
- Chapter 11 Yearning for Restriction in the Romantic Novel
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Scholarship on the role of precedents and precedential reasoning in law has tended to focus on questions concerning a commitment to stare decisis and the nature of analogy and justification. This chapter, by contrast, examines the use of rhetorical and formal techniques to convey an opinion’s precedential status. Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788, used a range of such techniques to indicate that he was changing the law and to signal that a given decision should govern future cases. His law reporter, James Burrow, credited as the creator of the headnote, complemented these efforts through his use of typography and page layout. Burrow’s ideas about clearer, fuller, and more focused reporting of legal decisions probably owed a considerable amount to his long-standing involvement with the Royal Society, whose published Transactions exhibit a series of generic changes, anticipating in some respects those that Burrow would adopt.
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- British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century , pp. 125 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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