Comparison of Equity Traditions in Common Law Countries
As with the geographical transmission of any cultural artifact, direct English influence over equity weakened with time and distance, although the widespread import of printed opinions provided a corrective force, however long delayed. As the colonies gained political independence, each of their legal systems began drifting from the original in an irreversible departure from the English way of making laws and deciding cases. Nonetheless, each former colony acknowledged the reception of the common law and equity of England as a vital source of their jurisprudence.
The comparative question is an easy one to pose. Did English equity develop maturity early enough that all of its derivative systems necessarily tended toward the same doctrines, based on exactly the same set of general principles? Or did the split-offs of any of the colonies occur somewhere in the middle of its development so that substantial permanent differences resulted? One equity, or many?
The answer generally accepted in America, the earliest of the English colonies to gain independence, is the former, that the outcome of a case to be decided today upon principles of equity should be expected to be substantially the same whether decided in the UK or the US. The reasonableness of the belief enjoys strong historical support.
The perfection of modern equity as a system has been authoritatively credited to Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke who served as Chancellor 1737–1756.
For a review of several distinct approaches to identifying how law changes that utilize English legal history as a test bed see Robert Palmer, English Legal History course.
Read more about this topic: Equity (law)
Famous quotes containing the words comparison, equity, traditions, common, law and/or countries:
“It is very important not to become hard. The artist must always have one skin too few in comparison to other people, so you feel the slightest wind.”
—Shusha Guppy (b. 1938)
“If equity and human natural reason were allowed there would be no law, there would be no lawyers.”
—Christina Stead (19021983)
“I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.”
—Joseph Addison (16721719)
“In common with other rural regions much of the Iowa farm lore concerns the coming of company. When the rooster crows in the doorway, or the cat licks his fur, company is on the way.”
—For the State of Iowa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.”
—Friedrich Von Bernhardi (18491930)
“It is a noble land that God has given us: a land that can feed and clothe the world; a land whose coastlines would enclose half the countries of Europe; a land set like a sentinel between the two imperial oceans of the globe.”
—Albert J. Beveridge (18621927)