Of strict logic and high technique
High Technique: THE PUBLICATIONS OF THE SELDON SOCIETY Founded 1887 to encourage the study and advance the knowledge of the history of English law. Volume XVII for the year 1903
No doubt it is a highly technical aspect of the work of the law that is displayed on the face of these reports. We see jurisprudence as art rather than as science : we see it even as a game of skill. These books written by lawyers for lawyers remind us of those which chess- players study. Herle castles unexpectedly; Toudeby sacrifices a bishop for the attack; Passeley's management of his pawns was a joy to all beholders. This is what interests the reporter, and let it be confessed that we, at this distance of time, cannot share his interest to the full.
But to call a law, or a statement of law, or a book of law ‘highly technical ‘is surely no condemnation. Legal skill, like other forms of skill, may be abused or misapplied, but in itself high technique is admirable wherever and whenever it is seen. And all this high technique, this mastery of technical phrase and technical thought, has its place in the history of the English people…
The qualities that saved English law when the day of trial came in the Tudor age were not vulgar common sense and the reflexion (reflection) of the layman's unanalyzed instincts: rather they were strict logic and high technique, rooted in the Inns of Court, rooted in the Year Books, rooted in the centuries.
There is little enough of crude common sense in Coke upon Littleton. What, so we take it, was distinctive of English law at the end of the middle age was the elaboration of rough native material into a highly technical, but at the same time durable, scheme of terms and concepts. That towering edifice, the law of ‘estates’, was a characteristic product. Nowadays its ruins cumber the ground, and, when historians draw pictures of it, we do not think it altogether admirable. We would have had it simpler, severer, chaster, less decorated, less flamboyant; but it was a wonderful and even a graceful feat of mental architecture, of lawyerly constructiveness.
English lawyers have been too modest about the part played by their science and their art in the making of the English nation.
Maitland’s introduction to the first volume of the Selden Society’s Year Book Series 1903
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‘When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mightier than she who once fought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-lengthening past, — figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life.'
0. W. Holmes, Speeches, Boston, 2 Sorel, Nouveaux essais d'histoire et 1900, p. 18. de critique, Paris, 1898, p. 64. II. Of the printed Year Books of Edward II