‘Something older than law itself’: Sir Henry Maine,Niebuhr, and ‘the path not chosen’

This article re-evaluates the intellectual context of Maine's historical jurisprudence by emphasising the importance of his classical background. Maine's time at Cambridge coincided with the rise of ‘progressive classical scholarship’, especially the study of ancient history in its social, economic and institutional setting. By exploring the links between Maine's work and that of the ancient historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, the article argues that an understanding of Maine's classical provenance enriches the appreciation of his work, especially its literary, interdisciplinary and educational challenge to the common law mind. Maine emerges on this account as a Victorian ‘neo-humanist’ whose later neglect is symptomatic of the more general separation of nineteenth-century English jurisprudence from mainstream European thought.     

The lecturer,the law student and the transmission of legal culture

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of recent work on the culture of the law school and its inhabitants. It examines two questions raised particularly by the work of Professor Fiona Cownie¹, one about staff and the other about students. Cownie detects a shift to greater eclecticism in the general intellectual climate of the legal academy and this paper questions whether this new stance is intellectually coherent. The second issue considered is the extent to which certain features of legal academic culture; its theoretical stances, the skills and values taught, persist and have an enduring effect on law students after they have left the academy and moved to the world of work.     

European national news

This article tracks developments at the national level in key European countries in the area of IT and communications and provides a concise alerting service of important national developments. It is co-ordinated by Herbert Smith Freehills LLP and contributed to by firms across Europe. This column provides a concise alerting service of important national developments in key European countries. Part of its purpose is to complement the Journal's feature articles and briefing notes by keeping readers abreast of what is currently happening ``on the ground'' at a national level in implementing EU level legislation and international conventions and treaties. Where an item of European National News is of particular significance, CLSR may also cover it in more detail in the current or a subsequent edition.     

Harriet Clisby’s ‘Sketches of Australia’: travel writing and colonial refigurations in Boston’s Woman’s Journal

During the late nineteenth century, the British-born Australian physician Harriet Clisby became involved in the vibrant social reform circles of Boston, Massachusetts. Her ‘Sketches of Australia’, a journalistic series of travel writings, were published in the reform-oriented Woman’s Journal in 1873. This series provides insight into the discursive construction of Australian colonial society in a transnational context. Thematically, the ‘Sketches’ explored questions of geography, culture, class, labor, ethnicity, race, and gender, often embracing popular scientific discourses about race and universalist visions of women’s rights. While such perspectives were common among Anglophone social reformers of the era, Clisby also portrayed Australia as a multiracial nation of immigrants rather than as a collection of white settler colonies. By making colonial Australia accessible for a specifically American readership, the ‘Sketches’ also established a sense of a budding international relationship between Australia and the United States prior to the twentieth century.