"In this collection of essays, leading legal historians address significant topics in the history of judges and judging, with comparisons not only between British, American and Commonwealth experience, but also with the judiciary in civil law countries. It is not the law itself, but the process of law-making in courts, that is the focus of inquiry. Contributors describe and analyse aspects of judicial activity, in the widest possible legal and social contexts, across two millennia. The essays cover English common law, continental customary law and ius commune, and aspects of the common law system in the British Empire. The volume is innovative in its approach to legal history. None of the essays offer straight doctrinal exegesis; none take refuge in old-fashioned judicial biography. The volume is a selection of the best papers from the 18th British Legal History Conference"--

"More than two hundred legal historians, from every corner of the globe, met in Oxford at the Eighteenth British Legal History Conference in early July 2007 to hear and present papers on the history of "judges and judging". A selection of the papers presented at the conference has now been revised and edited to form the chapters of this volume. Perhaps the theme of the conference and of this publication needs some initial explanation. The Legal Realists of the 1920s and 1930s rightly questioned the pre-eminence given to the study of decision-making in the courts in American legal education, and similar ideas have entered British and Commonwealth legal education in the past generation; the utterances of judges are not taken as the sum of, or even the core of, the law. But this is hardly news for legal historians. They have long been effortless, even naively unselfconscious, Realists, always concerned to understand the making of the law within the context of its time, with due attention to the society in which law is embedded and the shifting mentalities of professionals and other players in the legal system"--