CHAPTER
11
Peter Goodrich
Errant, qui quod exemplo fit id etiam fieri putant
The use and status of examples in common law has an enigmatic and fluctuating history veering from complete denial of their validity to the highest accolade of the exemplum as the very embodiment of authority. The argumentumad exemplum is more often deemed a fallacy than it is recognized as the primary source of common, which is to say case-based law, a tradition of precedent that prides itself on what Sir Edward Coke terms its almost infinite particulars.1 The example, in law French ensaumple is, for common lawyers, seemingly everything and nothing, a paradox of justificatory argument and thus worthy of historical reconstruction and jurisprudential expatiation if not resurrection.2
In the case of common law, the mos britannicus, the Anglican tradition of precedent, I will argue that the example is the defining feature of the jurisdiction. It is, first, emblematic of the specific tradition of infinite particulars, of a jus commune that is embedded in its own particular use of exempla, the narratives drawn from other disciplines, the Biblical, mythological and literary anecdotes and other illustrations that found a system of law as distinctive, as the expression of what Sir Philip Sidney termed a specific “Zodiack of wit” (1589/1907: 8). Second, the ensaumple, to use the proper term, has a liturgical function, which is that of paradoxically bringing law to presence. The exemplary is precisely that which exceeds the particular. It represents the incorporation of the past in the present, the embodiment of priority and precedent in singularity and contemporaneity. John Florio’s translation of Montaigne includes in the essay “Of Physiognomy”, along with his remarking upon his friend La Boetie’s “foulness of face”, the magnificent concept of the “examplelesse example”. This, I will argue, is thoroughly English, exemplary of the mos britannicus, not least in that the French simply has “ce merveilleux exemple” (1991 edn, Bk 3, ch 12, vol 2: 463). More so, however, in that the exampleless example is definitive of the particularity of common law practice, of an analogical (and also arguably a-logical) method that has generally preferred the particular to the principled, the succession of instances deemed similar, to the explicit promulgation of sovereign will.3 It is in this spirit of the mystical fact of law, on the basis of its simple antiquity, and the assertion of its priority over the present that for much of its history common law has acknowledged that communis error facit ius, that collective error makes law.4
Forensic rhetoric, imagination, and the ars memorandi
Shortly after declaring that common law is a discipline of nearly infinite particulars, Coke goes on to justify his argument for perseverance in the study of law by arguing that “in troth, reading, hearing, conference, meditation, and recordation are necessary, I confess”. This assertion is then confirmed by citation of Solomon: “the wisdom of the scribe comes through leisure (vacuitatis).”5 Coke means, of course, that study requires time, the leisure necessary to devotion of self to text and law in the humanist manner of relentless philology and exegesis. The excavation and unraveling of classical exempla is a limitless, indeed scriptural, pursuit. The exegetical methodology of common law has necessarily Christian roots and biblical references such as this are common enough in juristic texts. Thomas Wilson, to take a further instance from close to a century before Coke begins his discussion of the exemplum in his forensic manual of 1553, by stating that: “The historie of Gods booke to the Christian is infallible, and therefore the rehearsall of such good things as are therein conteined, move the faithfull to upright doing, and the amendment of life” (1553: 190). Coke has thus, here, followed the first rule of forensic rhetoric, namely that divine law – summa ratio est – resides at the pinnacle of the diverse laws, disciplines and jurisdictions that together make up the mos britannicus.6 Thomas Wilson’s point, however, is the broader one that examples are the key to persuasion and therefore need to be most carefully selected, studiously compiled and judiciously delivered. They are the face and frame of the tradition, the image of the law, the very exemplar of both learning and practice.
The brief exemplum that Coke uses is thus best understood initially as an instance of transmission of classical knowledge; the custody and passing on of a tradition collected in figures, maxims, narratives and other exempla from earlier eras. Two features of the initial reference need notation. First, the biblical figure is not strictly a legal citation but rather the insertion of a justificatory reasoning and higher authority into the juristic text. The exemplum is here emblematic, meaning that it conveys an exterior and foreign text, in disciplinary terms an alien knowledge that both legitimates the legal by evidencing its theological sources and conveys a history of origins and of an unbroken tradition that attaches to the laws of the land, the peoples and places of Britannia. The exemplum is in this respect poetic, meaning concerned with the mythological and literary foundations of the juristic tradition, the fictions that found the order of law. A store of poetic references, the exempla of the classical tradition are for Coke and his contemporary fabricators of the common law the auctoritates poetarum that can legitimately be cited to support and illustrate the specific arguments to be made. Coke cites the Bible and elicits the support of Solomon, the wisest of fabled judges, and elsewhere he turns to Horace for critical (and satirical) support, and to the face and frame of Thomas Littleton, for his image of the law. Contemporary civilian texts likewise make very clear that in the founding moment of the tradition, the classical mythological and poetic exempla are the grounds, the fabulous and fabulated foundations of the transmission of the legal order as a transhistorical and continuing practice, the perceptions and presence of dwarves on the shoulders of giants as the glossators put it.7
The classical exempla exceed the bounds of the discipline of law and thus the often rather defensive prefatory justifications which, following the exemplum of Justinian in the Corpus Iuris, dictate implausibly and certainly inaccurately that the study of law embraces all disciplines, and requires a knowledge of things divine and human. The methodological desideratum is evidently aspirational, but later becomes a humanistic rallying cry for erudition and historical knowledge, for philological sophistication and equally plays the role of opening the juridical to the fictions of history and the conjunction of images, often pictures, that rhetoric as the bearer of tradition in practice would deliver so as to persuade the audience of trials and other promulgations, performances and enactments. The example is at times discussed expressly as an image, as for instance in Fabbri’s Great and True Rhetoric of 1551 (1553 edn, lxiii verso). The source of that reference is Aristotle’s De Memoria where memory is defined as “a state or affection” connected to perception or conception. When we think of something, the scholar says, we think of an image of the thing: “Memory, even the memory of objects of thought, is not without an image. So memory will belong to thought in virtue of an incidental association, but in its own right to the primary perceptive part” (Sorabji 1972: 49). Memory is embedded in imagination and thus a discipline such as common law, which must begin with the images, the emblematic exempla, of the past in its diversity and intrication, must start with the art of memory as the custodian and implementer of those knowledges that the renaissance, in law as elsewhere, was concerned to revive.
In his preparative or guide for students of law, Sir John Doderidge, who sat on the bench with Sir Edward Coke, begins the substantive portion of his treatise with a discussion of memory as mater musarum and, borrowing from Cicero (Tully), defines memory as “signatarum rerum in mente vestigium – the character of things imprinted in our mind” (1631: 13). The lawyer needs a sound memory for storing the endless particulars, the unlimited exempla of legal casuistry over time. Memory is thus the compilation of examples: it is “a store-house infinitely capable, and can never be overfilled, wherein … are hoorded up all kindes of acts and accidents that either the outward senses have perceived, or the inward understanding conceived” (1631: 13). Memory, for the lawyer, here provides the substance of a temporally conceived and disciplinarily expansive justificatory framework and method for the application of law. The storehouse or locus communis is the lexicon of potential legal arguments, the historical register of past practices that will locate and ease the particular rule, precedent or principle, into action. Thus, for Doderidge, the actus memorandi “is the representation of things past, as if they were still present, representing the Image of things forepassed in the same manner as if they were now actually and really present” (1631: 14–15). The storehouse of prior practices, the examples conceived as images of classical or antique events, are not simply the method of recalling the substance of dogma and doctrine but are also the sites of inventio, of the beginning of any given justificatory argument.
The initial function of the image as exemplum and, more technically, as emblematum is primarily rhetorical in the sense of persuasive, both of the professional character of the lawyer, the iuris peritus, and of the erudition that he transmitted. The exempla that the lawyers used were ideally familiar to experience and therefore cogent and alluring to the auditors, but at the same time, being drawn from a variety of disciplines and from diverse chronicles and scriptures, would always also present the possibility of relaying more esoteric and questionable dogmas. Take, for instance, John Selden’s Mare clausum, in which he argues unstintingly for the legal right of the English to dominion over the seas surrounding the island. He adduces numerous testimonies and other examples of the documented assertion of right to dominion, and then turns, nearly 100 pages into Book 2 of the treatise, to the exemplum of King Canutus or Cnute.8
I am fond of the anecdote and have discussed it from time to time for other purposes, so will only briefly recall the example, taken from the chronicles of Huntington. King Canute, tired of flatterers and to demonstrate that Kings were but men, had his court followers carry him “on a seat” to the sea at Southampton. There, as the tide came in – “it being flood” – “made trial of the obedience of the Sea … after this manner, Thou, O Sea, art under my dominion, as the Land also upon which I sit is mine.9 And there never was any that disobeied my Command without punishment. Therefore I command thee not to ascend up upon my Land, nor do thou presume to wet the feet or garment of thy Sovereign.” The tide, however, ignored him and “did very unmannerly wet not onely the feet, but legs of his Majestie.” All of which aquatic anecdote was taken by Canute to mean that God alone governed, and none but the divinity could rule the tides and control the sea. For Selden, however, this exemplum has a very different and somewhat counter-intuitive meaning, namely that Canute was King of the Sea: “He expressly affirms in what was before related, that the Sea itself was under his Dominion” (1652: 281–82). The exemplum in this instance turns an impossibility into a fact and presents a declaration of the law, the royal address to the sea, as determinative of the fact, not of what happened, but of what the act would come to mean. If repeated often enough, if said and said again, then the example ceases to be an example and is elevated into a principle: it becomes truth and law. Selden, indeed, acknowledging this trajectory from example to ensaumple, from particular to law, states, on the same page, that it is not “any prejudice to this autoritie, that the other things there related are fabulous”. The example becomes an image, a dogma, a truth because, as the lawyers were wont to repeat, communis error facit ius.
The exampleless example of judgment
The making present of the past through the exemplary images recalled by the actus memorandi is only a start, a threshold, a prerequisite for the legal manipulation of the greatly more specific exempla of cases, dooms and judgments. These proceed by way of analogy, ad similia from such examples as have, by virtue of time and repetition, whether erroneously or otherwise, become law. Thus Selden’s citation, an historical exemplum, an emblematum, becomes a curiosity in the early modern international law of the sea. To compound error with error, to make it common, it gets taken as a precedent for a claim that Selden himself does not make, namely that England has a right to dominion of any seas that it needs for access to its territories. Selden only laid claim to coastal waters and the example of Canute was part of his historical foundation for the antiquity and documentation of such a claim. In that his interpretation of Canute’s declaration seems in error, it is nonetheless an error that for Selden makes law. For an example to become exemplary, to augment and instantiate law, requires a second feature of memory, which is that of the actus reminiscendi. The simple fact of the example, the prior case, is not enough to bring the image to life, nor is it sufficient to raise the specific instance to the level of the exampleless which, I will argue, is the differentia specifica that makes it law.
The fact that a fabulation or fiction such as Selden’s instance can become a law requires its insertion into discourse, its tabulation and concatenation with other reasons such that, over time, it becomes a precedent in the strong sense of becoming binding, a rule, a maxim, a principle. Thus the rule that communis error facit ius has to be understood to be complemented by the seemingly contradictory Justinian principle, adopted by common lawyers, by Coke amongst others, non exemplis, sed legibus judicandum fit – we ought to judge by laws and not by examples.10 The Italian-born, Oxford jurist Alberico Gentili offers an alternative version: sana ratio exemplis anteponitur (sound reason far outstrips examples). The maxim is also expressed in terms of a judicial preference for principle rather than cases and, in the work of Francis Bacon, of maxims over particulars. Here the reference historically is to the ensaumple that has become a precedent, a judgment, and so gained the status of law which is simply the expansion of the instance or singular example into the expanded frame, cognate with the early French exemplir, to augment, of the analogical discourse of legal judgment. Thus in the Year Books, while mostly the ensaumple is simply a reference to non-binding examples, to particulars which cannot be taken for law, we can find on occasion the ensaumple stated paradoxically to be a precedent, as in quei que vous parlez es ensaumples.11
Returning to Doderidge’s discussion of legal method, the actus memorandi has a complement and confrere in the actus reminiscendi by means of which the example is expanded into other examples and the “Discourse of Memory”, the operation whereby “the one draweth the other as the severall likes of a Chaine draw and depend one upon another” (1631: 12). This is the argument de exemplo that Wilson describes as “a manner of Argumentation, where one thing is proved by another, for the likeness, that is found to be in them both” (Wilson 1551: fol. Hvi recto). This is Homer’s golden chain (vinculum artis) which ascends and descends through time. The example is a particular. A multitude of similar particulars produce a general, an ensaumple, which was the product of common and collective examples, in turn corroborated by time and repetition, so as to have gained the status of what legal logicians called generals, thus becoming universalia, namely laws. It is not any example but rather the tried, tested, deliberated and recorded ensaumple that is treated as law.12 The judgment that has priority over the simple and singular example is that of the authorized and pithily truncated generality drawn from particulars or mere examples: “The inventing of Artes came by observation of particulers: … of a little sparke commeth a great flame” (Fraunce 1588: 114 verso). As examples are always particulars – they are termed specials – they cannot, in themselves, justify judgment but rather that selection of composite and customized examples that trial has tested and repeated, becomes the generals, the statements of authority which can, with time, found judgment and build the chain of precedents.
Two observations are pertinent to the distinction between the example that becomes law (the ensaumple) and the example that is and remains singular and special. The first is that when the maxim judicandum est legibus non exemplis is cited, the ‘subjunctive’ judgment that ought to resist examples is quite simply the authority of the judge. Doderidge says as much in instancing that “[l]aw arguments are deduced more from authority than reason, for the English Lawyer in arguments requireth most the strength of Cases … and Presidents of former time, then discourse of reason and therefore Logicke which respecteth onely inference, and discourse of reason is not so needful for a Lawyer” (Doderidge 1631: 55–56). Judgment through authority thus makes examples into precedents and cases into formulas that will be repeated. These are the forms of law, the maxims and regulae iuris that make the beginning of judgment and the first link in the chain of likenesses composing the system of precedent that is the weave, woof and waft – the supposedly seamless web of common law.
The second observation is that insofar as precedents are simply preferred examples, there is, in fact, no qualitative difference between judgments de exemplo and judgments based on general principles, which is to say upon authority. We must admit at the level of epistemology, but not that of ontology and practice, that example and ensaumple are essentially the same. What has to be supported, justified, made exampleless, and here Doderidge is quite correct, is the general principle that starts the chain of justificatory argumentation. As this is itself drawn from cases, which is to say from examples, because there is nowhere else for it to come from, it has to present another source and legitimacy: the statement of authority, the ipse dixit or fuit of the judge who pronounced the prior case. Memory must provide the image, the classical figure, the biblical or solomonic likeness, a lex loquens, a mouth, muthos as mythos, that first pronounced the precedent that has become law. At this point, upon judicial pronouncement and approbation the case becomes transported into a general, it transforms into a rule, a maxim, so called because it is maximus, because there is nothing greater than it, and because now, finally, it is an exampleless example.
Hoc est exemplum meum
The exampleless instance evidently outstrips and is exterior to the example even if the manner of its creation is through and by means of a plurality of particulars. These particulars, of which Coke was so fond, which he believed to be the very best inheritance that we poor English have, are finally, not law but practice, not rules but examples. They are not exampleless but, in a paradoxical twist or more technically mysterious manner must, in their turn, reflect the parallel ontology and superior abstraction of Montaigne’s “merveilleux exemple”, which is quoad non ultra, a dogma, a vision, a moment of prerogrative prior imposition that acts as the limit of thought and the instance of faith, meaning legitimacy of law. The marvelous is mystery, the moment of visibility of an invisible power, the presence of what has no being and is not, the advent of law as maxime, as that which forms the last instance. It is important to note, nonetheless, that the general depends upon the particular, just as the universal is nothing without singularities. This leads Fraunce to make the point that while the logic of law may be based upon the universals provided by authority and judgment, it still requires specials, instances of instantiation, examples in the occasions of its application. Thus: “hee that hath a general sight in Logike, hath but the shadowe. He that is acquainted with the particular practice, is the onely true and perfit logician.” There follows a lengthy elaboration of how practice is the relevant and genuine test of a profession and so “I will never call him a Musician that never sang: a carpenter that never builded a house: a souldier that never fought” despite their general speculations in their discipline. (1588: 115 recto). The exercise of logic is its practice, just as the meaning of virtue is living virtuously. So, too, for Fraunce, the life of law is just judgment, proper disposition. This last example, that of a juridical ontology that founds the epistemology of law can provide the avenue to the conclusion that when we return to the example as the event of decision, the rendering of judgment in the particular, we encounter a trinity of factors, the trial and decision as a liturgical moment, a ceremony and rite of incorporation of the law upon the model of the incarnation or becoming human of Christ.13
The exemplum, in the medieval period cognate with the earliest reception of the classical law, some time before the English reception, has a theological status and provenance that gains brief recognition in Wilson’s rhetoric, as adumbrated, and which Coke and others perhaps less than wittingly relay in their biblical examples and other scriptural citations that follow the method of patristic exegesis. Stephen of Bourbon, for instance, born in the year 1190, the year in which the Corpus Iuris Civilis was rediscovered, wrote a treatise on preaching that ordered the materials of address through exempla. His unfinished, but copious, Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus was an incomparable collection of anecdotes and other exempla that would be used both as mnemonic sites of invention and as modes of exemplifying the rule.14 The ordering was from a truncated biblical text, a theological adage, to an explanation and then an example, the Trinitarian order thus evinced had the status, according to Stephen, of auctoritas, ratio et exemplum. This work became a model and is replicated most directly by Humbert of Romans in his collection De habundancia exemplorum. What is important for our purposes is that that the exemplum gains in status and ontological force, it becomes the flesh of the authority, the instantiation of the word in the deed. Thus, Stephen argues directly that the preacher embody his lesson, just as Christ did: “The highest wisdom of God, Jesus Christ, taught in deeds (factis) before words and he rendered the subtlety of preaching and doctrine almost corporeal, thick and visible, fortifying and clothing it with different comparisons, parables, miracles, and exempla …” (Lecoy de la Marche 1877: 4). Christ’s preaching was first embodied, made present, in his deeds. The word became flesh, sermo corporeus in one formula, and was incarnated in precedents, in exemplary acts, in miracles, in the palpable and sensible incarnation of the divine mystery that took the form of verba visibilia of the sacrament.
The theologians were clear that the ars praedicandi was to incorporate and enact what it represented as visible truths – sensibilibus sententiis (Bernstein 1990: 82). Humbert then proceeds, like Coke, to cite Solomon as the exemplar of wisdom, whose parables and proverbs function as sensible exempla and represent spiritual things in quotidian acts. The exemplum here comes to perform a Eucharistic function: just as the bread and wine represent body and blood, the parable or exemplum represents the external form of an interior, spiritual meaning. It is the flesh, the clothes of the spirit, the form by which the invisible truth is perceived and known. This is the effectus, the putting into practice of the mystery that Agamben explicates in the theology of the liturgy and which lawyers had from the Twelve Tables on associated with the legis actio, the juridical sacrament that effectuates the word in the deed. (2013a: 34–36) What is said must be done and the institution of the trial, historically the legis actio, is precisely the modality through which lawyers clothe the abstract rule, and give flesh to animalegis. The trial makes the law visible and sensible, it incorporates the rule and uses the exemplum to presence the past and to imagine, and so effectuate, the order of truth to which judgment must always yield.
Conclusion
The juridical example is, in the end, enigmatic in its plurality. If we trace the exempla of the early Anglican jurists they are remarkably fluid and expansive. We find the texts that establish the mos britannicus replete with a vast array of mythological, theological, historical and fictive anecdotes relayed to found, to provide images, and in Selden’s terms, to institute a “face and frame” of government (Selden 1631: preface, n.p.). These mere examples, the fabulous histories and plural mythologies that trace Anglican law to the Samothes, to Ceres, to Pythagoras and the Druids, to Lycurgus of Sparta, to Romulus and Remus, to Brutus, to nature and God, provide the context and eventually merge with the plurality of cases, the precedents that are simply anecdotal, that are prior and older but not necessarily yet exemplary. The stronger sense of ensaumple, of the exampleless example, is the ‘President’, the prior judgment that becomes an emblem of truth, the enactment of a rule that can never be repeated but must continuously be imitated, and whose likeness is sought in all similar instances. Here, in what I have in quasi-historicist fashion coined as the ensaumple of the law, the legal becomes visible, the spirit of law is made flesh on the model of the theological exemplum as Eucharistic and sacramental enactment.
Jurisprudence is no longer theology, and the trial is an increasingly quotidian and mediatized event – a tribunal – which can sometimes be taken to detract from the dignity of ceremony and the decorum of judgment. I am not concerned to argue here for a re-theatricalization of the trial, or for a more sacramental account of precedent cases, but rather to suggest that the mos britannicus, a system of law built on examples and, at least historically, nothing but examples, writs and then precedents, should understand the political theology of the example. It is predicated upon an anima legis defined quite explicitly in the mystical terms of time immemorial, time out of mind, time beyond the memory of men. These laws “renowned above others for their antiquity … are not only good but the best.”15 The historically exemplary character of mos britannicus dictates both the national distinctiveness and the exemplary, which is here to say ethical and equitable content of the customary laws. The exemplar is a fiction that transcends the historical, and to cite Selden “those things which the Poëts speak are true, but cover’d under an certain veil or Figure. And they have so veiled the Truth with Fiction, that the Truth itself might not take off from the common belief of the People.”16
The exemplars, the exemplary narratives deliquesce into the customs and uses that form the common erudicion, the communis opinio of the Bar as that set of historical examples of continued practice that form the common places of legal argument. From the plurality of mere examples, prior cases, recorded customs generically termed fragmenta antiquitatis, the exempla that become “Presidents,” the maxims, principles and rules of common law are drawn.17 The exemplum as maximus, as incontestable and unimpugnable maxim has a status which combines past and present and bears in it the “corps of law … proprium & sanctissimum templum iustitae consecratum.”18 It is these examples, those that Bacon terms consecrated in the temple of justice and thereby rendered most holy, that are termed judgments and not examples. They are exampleless examples and, as such, support the juridical theology that dictates judicandum est legibus non exemplis (we ought to judge by laws and not by examples).
Endnotes
1Coke, (1777) 13 Reports xxvii – legum nostrarum … infinitis prope particularibus consistit.
2I am referring here to the excellent and parallel argument put forward in relation to US common law in Arthur J. Jacobson (1992) where he argues, in effect, that as a rhetorical form, the example dies (along with legal rhetoric) under the weight of positivistic jurisprudence: “the whole purpose of [modern] jurisprudence is to stamp out individuality” (136).
3Agamben (2012) 18–19 takes up a version of this distinction, between exemplar and exemplum in Sextus Pompeius Festus; he discusses this further in relation to aesthetics, and the pathosformel (affective formulas) in Agamben, (2013b).
4St German (1528) at 21, citing ecclesiastical authority. For a common law example, see Brent’s Case (1575) 2 Leo. 14, at 15: “These uses at the first were of no value, but afterwards by continuance communis error fecit jus, so as they were taken and esteemed as inheritances …” These and other texts are discussed lucidly in J.H. Baker, The Law’s Two Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) ch. 1.
5Ecclesiasticus 38: 25: scribe sapientiam tempore vacuitatis tuae …
6On the latter maxim, see, for example, Edmund Wingate (1668) 3: summa ratio est, quae pro Religone facit. William Noy (1642) 1 is to the same effect.
7The title page of the Senneton edition of Justinian’s Codex (1549 edn) for example, bears the subtitle Novem libros mythicis imaginibus illustratos complectens. As for the notion of inferiority in relation to the classics – Nos, quasi nani super gigantum humeros sunt – the source is Pierre de Blois and was a commonplace of the medieval era.
8For ease of access I have, in the main, used the 1652 translation of Mare clausum [1635]: John Selden (1652).
9Selden (1652, 279). I discuss this anecdote and its interpretation, in Goodrich, ‘Aquatopia: Lines of Amity and Laws of the Sea’, in Anthony Carty and Janne Nijmann (eds), (fc 2015).
10Justinian, Codex 1.13; discussed in Sir Robert Wiseman (1656, 71).
11Literally: what that you talk in the examples. For discussion, see J.H. Baker (2000: 159–160).
12See Jacobson (1992) 138: “The rule is the example, the sample of samples, that we use as an instrument of protection … The project is to weave affairs so that the samples – the cases – and the samples of samples – the legal rules – in fact provide the protection.”
13This is a point that is briefly, but suggestively, referred to in Giorgio Agamben (2013a) 29–58.
14J.T. Welter (1927: 300), describes it as “a vast repertoire of exempla.”
15Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus legum Angliae [c. 1465], in Shelley Lockwood (ed.), Sir John Fortescue on the Laws and Governance of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 26–27.
16Selden, Dominion of the Sea, 47.
17Thomas Blount, (1679) bears the subtitle Antient Tenures of Land, and Jocular Customs of some Mannors.
18Francis Bacon (1630) epistle dedicatory.
References
Agamben, G. (2012) The Signature of all Things, New York: Zone Books.
— (2013a) Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
— (2013b) Nymphs, London: Seagull Books.
Bacon, F. (1630) A Collection of some Principall Rules and Maximes of the Common Lawes of England, with their Latitude and Extent, London: Moore.
Baker, J.H. (2000) The Common Law Tradition, London: Hambledon.
— (2002) The Law’s Two Bodies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bernstein, A. (1990) “The exemplum as incorporation of Abstract Truth in the Thought of Humbert of Romans and Stephen of Bourbon,” in Mayali, L. and Tibbetts, S. (eds), The Two Laws: Studies in Medieval Legal History dedicated to Stephan Kuttner, Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press.
Blount, T. (1679) Fragmenta antiquitatis, London: Atkins.
Coke, Sir, E. (1777 edn) Reports, London: Rivington.
Doderidge, Sir, J. (1631) The English Lawyer, London: More, 1631.
Fabbri, P. (1521) Le Grant et vray art du pleine rhétorique, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints.
Fortescue, Sir, J. (1997) De Laudibus legum Angliae [c. 1465], in Shelley Lockwood, S. (ed.), Sir John Fortescue On the Laws and Governance of England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fraunce, A. (1588) The Lawiers Logike, London: Howe.
Goodrich, P. (forthcoming 2015) “Aquatopia: Lines of Amity and Laws of the Sea,” in Carty, A. and Nijmann, J. (eds), Morality and Responsibility of Rulers: European and Chinese Origins of the Rule of Law for World Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jacobson, A. J. (1992) “Death of the Hypothetical,” Stanford Literature Review, 9: 125–138.
Justinian (1549) Codex, Lyons: Senneton.
Lecoy de La Marche, A. (1877) Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologuestirés du receuil inédit d’Etienne de Bourbon. Paris: Renouard.
Montaigne, M. (1991 edn) Essays, trans Florio, J., London: Nonesuch Press.
Noy, W. (1642) A Treatise of the Principall Grounds and Maximes of the Lawes of the Kingdome, London: W. Cook.
St German, C. (1528) Doctor and Student, Plucknett (ed.), London: Selden Society (1974).
Selden, J. (1631) Titles of Honor, London: Stansby.
— (1652) Of the Dominion, Or, Ownership of the Sea, London: Du-Gard.
Sidney, Sir, P. (1595/1907 edn) An Apologie for Poetry, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sorabji, R. (ed.) (1972) Aristotle on Memory, London: Duckworth.
Welter, J. (1927) L’Exemplum dans la littérature religieuse et didactique du moyen-âge. Paris: Guitard.
Wilson, T. (1551) The Rule of Reason, Conteining the Art of Logike, Set Forth in Englishe, London: Smith.
— (1553) The Arte of Rhetorique, London: Robinson.
Wingate, E. (1668) Maximes of Reason, Or, the Reason of the Common Law of England, London: W. Less.
Wiseman, Sir, Robert (1656) The Law of Laws, Or, the Excellency of the Civil Law above all other Humane Laws whatsoever, London: Royston, 1686.