HLGC Annual Lecture – Dr Ian Williams

HLGC annual lecture will take place November 20, LASS B55 at 6pm. The speaker will be Dr Ian Williams (St John's College, Oxford), who will speak on "Precedent and Sovereignty in Early-Modern Equity: The View from the Star Chamber". Dr Williams has sent the following abstract:

In this lecture I shall investigate the history of precedent in early-modern equity. Precedent played a central role in equity changing from its origin as exceptional discretionary justice to its more familiar form as a body of law within the English legal system. However, the sources for examining the role of precedent in equity are very limited, if we constrain ourselves to the major private law equity courts of Chancery and Exchequer. Using the reports of cases in the criminal equity court of Star Chamber provides a much larger body of sources. Star Chamber material also enables us to consider an early-modern theorisation of equity as an emanation of sovereignty, in which deciding cases could be understood as an aspect of sovereignty and precedent as a form of legislation, and see this legislative activity in operation.

Ian is a fellow and associate professor in law at St John’s College and the Faculty of Law. Before joining the Faculty he was an associate professor in law at University College London. He teaches in the Faculty’s various legal history papers across the BA and BCL, as well as tutorial teaching in trusts, land law and Roman law. Ian’s research interests are centred on English legal history. He is the editor of the Journal of Legal History and his research was awarded the David Yale prize for an outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales. Most of his research concerns the early-modern period (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), although he has published on topics from the late-thirteenth century onwards. He is particularly interested in the interaction between legal practice and more theoretical ideas of law and norms, as well as the communication of law (mostly, but not only, through printed and manuscript texts). At present his work focuses on the court of Star Chamber, for which he is editing a volume of seventeenth century law reports and working on a project about the theory and practice of the court as a provider of criminal equity.