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This chapter examines the role of the Court of Chancery in the judicial system in England during the Tudor period. The Chancery was a superior royal court with ever increasing business and the power even to inhibit proceedings in the Commons and King's benches. It was the original bureaucratic department of state and was one of the principal branches of the central bureaucracy in early modern times. The Chancery was also closely connected with the business of the common law through its responsibility for issuing original writs.

This chapter traces the history of the Court of Chancery and equity. The equitable jurisdiction derived from the extraordinary jurisdiction of the king’s council. By 1400 the chancellor had his own court and was issuing decrees in his own name. It was not tied to law but could coerce the conscience of a defendant, for instance to desist from an unconscionable suit at law. Equity was not in conflict with the law, but there was a dispute between Coke and Ellesmere in 1615 over injunctions after judgment. Most equitable principles began with relief given on the facts of individual cases, but the multitude of suits generated common principles, many of which were elucidated by Lord Nottingham. The court’s initially informal procedure became unmanageably complex as more suitors resorted to it. The later Chancery was a byword for delay and despair; the chapter ends with an account of its reform.

Having established the boundaries within which women's experience of property operated, the remaining chapters of this book consider the property experience of women in relation to the family estate, how women related to the concept of the family interest and in what contexts their interests differed. This chapter considers instances, in this class, when the traditional structure of the family was suspended, such as when the heir to the estate was a minor, or insane. When the heir to a landed estate was a minor, or was declared insane, the management of her or his welfare and landed estate came within the remit of the Court of Chancery. The prevailing structure of the family, in which control over family property was exercised by the husband and father, was therefore suspended and there were increased opportunities for women to undertake an expanded role in the management of family property as guardians of minors, or as committees responsible for the affairs of the insane.

In Anderson v Hogg a shareholder in a company presented a petition under section 459 of the Companies Act 1985 for relief against unfair prejudice. The petitioner sought to have the respondent ordained to repay to the company sums which the company had paid to the respondent by way of allegedly unauthorised salary bonus, redundancy payments, and the like. In the Outer House, Lord Reed found that the various payments did not result in unfair prejudice to the petitioning shareholder and refused the petition. This chapter argues that the traditional Scottish scepticism about equity as a source is well justified. In particular, it is justified by among other things the very policy against unwise anglicisation which Sir Thomas normally preached. More specifically, the chapter contends that it is misleading to say that the Court of Session has an equitable jurisdiction comparable to that of the English Court of Chancery; that we do not need such a jurisdiction; and what is more we are better off without it.

This chapter examines the legal problems of James Fenimore Cooper during the early 1820s. It focuses on the Bridgen suit, a series of three successive New York Chancery Court bills filed against the Cooper heirs by Albany resident Thomas Bridgen in the years leading up to 1822. It discusses the impact of the so-called Pomeroy Bill of the negotiations between Cooper and Bridgen and explains how the issue was settled.

Most bankruptcy cases in the US are heard by specialized bankruptcy courts, which are vested with authority to hear such cases by the US district courts. The United States Congress granted US district courts original and exclusive jurisdiction over—that is, the authority to hear—US bankruptcy cases. However, district courts may (and uniformly do) refer such cases and proceedings to the bankruptcy courts in their respective districts, often pursuant to standing referral orders (in other words, the referral to the bankruptcy courts is automatic).

A lack of confidence in English law courts first arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the corruption of justice in outlying regions of the country. Reforms undertaken by the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII helped to restore trust in the legal process, but distrust arose once again during the personal rule of Charles I and among law reformers in the 1640s and 1650s. Distrust of English law courts reached a peak in the late seventeenth century in reaction to the coercion of juries and the violation of defendants’ rights in trials of Whigs and religious dissenters. Other sources of judicial distrust in late seventeenth-century England and the early American republic were the procedures in treason trials, which resulted in the unfair prosecution of opponents of the government. The harshness and unfairness of punishments for all crimes also eroded faith in the entire criminal justice system in both Britain and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This chapter examines the crucial role of Lafargue Clinic in the school desegregation cases that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. It discusses Wertham’s October 1951 testimony to the Delaware Court of Chancery in two similar cases, in conjunction with his infamous 1954 anti-comic book treatise, Seduction of the Innocent. Both his testimony as well as his Seduction of the Innocent were based on clinical psychiatric examinations of interracial groups of children conducted at Lafargue Clinic. The two cases reveal a provocative, singularly original set of arguments about racism as a public health threat to children of all races.

Equitable considerations have been present in human societies for unfathomable aeons. From ancient Greece and Rome to modern times, through ecclesiastical law and the medieval English Chancery, equity has introduced considerations of fairness in legal thought and has helped mitigate the harshness of draconian laws. What is considered equitable has varied over time, with the equitable innovations of the past typically becoming the hard law of today. The purpose of the chapter is to show equity’s continuity in time and across legal systems, as a stepping stone to the argument presented later in the book that equity is a source of international law. The chapter explains that the distinct ways in which we make sense of equity owe something to its historical evolution in our respective legal systems. Ultimately, the chapter highlights equity’s journey from municipal legal systems to international law.

Establishes the family dynamic which later led to his orphaning, his ultimate decision to migrate, as well as to the emotional and intellectual tension that propelled John into the cosmos of English poets. The boys are sent to a liberal school in Enfield at an early age, but their father dies in a riding accident after visiting them. Their mother quickly remarries and abandons the children to their grandmother. The mother slides through brandy and disease to her early death. The situation makes the children extremely close, John calling George his “greatest friend.”

This chapter studies the role of equity in preserving the autonomy of vulnerable members of the community. It focuses on the equitable domains of trusts, fiduciary relationships, undue influence, and unconscionability, where an imbalance of power exists in which one party has only limited or bounded ability to make decisions. Equity takes great care to protect the independence aspect of autonomous decision, but is less concerned about the availability of choice between meaningful options. A party will be deemed by equity as consenting if their agreement is anchored in freedom and information. Thus, great care is taken by the Courts of Chancery to ensure that no impediment to the exercise of the claimant's will was present in the circumstance. In addition, relevant information must be provided, and at times nothing less than independent advice from a third party would satisfy this requirement. Equity thus conscripts its particularistic nature to offer strong protection for two elements that are crucial for autonomous decision-making: freedom from coercion and information.

This chapter examines Delaware, a small U.S. state located on the Eastern Seaboard that has become the predominant jurisdiction of incorporation for U.S. public companies and a global competitor in the organization of various forms of business entities. Although scholars and practitioners of U.S. corporate law are not accustomed to thinking about Delaware amidst jurisdictions typically regarded as “offshore,” close inspection reveals that Delaware exhibits substantial commonalities with them in its historical, cultural, and geographic circumstances, as well as its economic development strategies. Delaware in fact embodies the MDSJ concept every bit as well as the others, reinforcing the argument that MDSJs can be coherently described as a “type” of jurisdiction prominent in cross-border finance.

In this chapter, I develop a new account of what is distinctively ‘equitable’ about equitable rights. On this account, equity as an institution regulates the pathways to legal rights. A person who is on a completeable but as yet incomplete path to acquire legal rights is vulnerable to interruption triggering the forfeiture of her position. Courts of equity fulfill the role of the state to preserve the integrity of the legal order by regulating the pathways to rights. This account explains and unifies equity’s traditional domain—the cluster of doctrines and principles that originated in the courts of equity. It also provides the lens through which to understand equity’s concern with a special kind of injustice where a person suffers an interruption along the way to private rights.

A great deal can be learned about the patent medicine business from the lengths to which people went to secure possession of a share of the market. Several key official documents allow us to examine in some detail the public squabble between his daughter Urania Sibly and his partner Charles Wilson Saffell. Urania Sibly’s central role in the Solar Tincture business is additionally interesting because the literature of early modern medicine in Britain so seldom discusses women’s activities either as medical practitioners or independent purveyors of proprietary nostrums. Urania, however, emerges as an active and unique agent—suing for money left her in her father’s will, and when she did not get it, going into the Solar Tincture business herself. She manufactured it from 1803 until shortly before her death in 1878, at age ninety-six.

Chapter 8 examines the most prominent proposed cure in corporate policymaking circles: to give boards and executives more autonomy from stock markets. Such a cure has problems. Because boards and executives seem to be themselves sources of short-term thinking, it’s unclear, even for those who perceive a corporate short-termism problem with a stock market cause, whether more executive and board autonomy would improve the situation. More autonomy would simultaneously create other problems, including bolstering one of our business elites.