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This book examines the development of legal professionalism in the early English common law, with specific reference to the 13th-century treatise known as Bracton and to its likely authors.

The King's Felons examines the subtle development of criminal confinement as an alternative to capital punishment in early Tudor England. Providing the first detailed study of criminal justice in the early Tudor period, McGlynn highlights the Church's role and reframes our understanding of significant acts of the Reformation parliament.

This volume provides the first in-depth intellectual history of the contractual thought of Viscount Stair, a pivotal figure in the shaping of Scots Law. It traces the key influences from theology, philosophy, and natural law that through Stair contributed to a distinct approach to legal thought in Scotland.

Federal Ground depicts the haphazard and unplanned growth of federal authority in the Northwest and Southwest Territories, the first U.S. territories established under the new territorial system. The nation''s foundational documents, particularly the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, placed these territories under sole federal jurisdiction and established federal officials to govern them. But, for all their paper authority, these officials rarelycontrolled events or dictated outcomes. In practice, power in these contested borderlands rested with the regions'' pre-existing inhabitants-diverse Native peoples, French villagers, and Anglo-American settlers. These residents nonetheless turned to the new federal government to claim ownership, jurisdiction,protection, and federal money, seeking to obtain rights under federal law. Two areas of governance proved particularly central: contests over property, where plural sources of title created conflicting land claims, and struggles over the right to use violence, in which customary borderlands practice intersected with the federal government''s effort to establish a monopoly on force. Over time, as federal officials improvised ad hoc, largely extrajudicial methods to arbitrate residents'' claims, they slowly insinuated federal authority deeper into territorial life. Thisauthority survived even after the former territories became Tennessee and Ohio: although these new states spoke a language of equal footing and autonomy, statehood actually offered former territorial citizens the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. The federal government,in short, still could not always prescribe the result in the territories, but it set the terms and language of debate-authority that became the foundation for later, more familiar and bureaucratic incarnations of federal power.