Legal Lore: Curiosities of Law and Lawyers

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
341K words
Chapters
35

Tags

English Originals Law Historical ReappraisalLegal LoreWorkplace RelationsComplex HumanitySocial CritiqueMoral DilemmaCase AnalysisPopular Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971, and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. Legal Lore: Curiosities of Law and Lawyers by William Andrews. Author: , Language: English, Class: K: Law in general, Comparative and uniform law, Jurisprudence, Release Date: Jan 16, 2012

Editor's review

This book centers on law and lawyers, collecting assorted curiosities from legal history; it belongs to the early genre of legal anecdote. Its value lies in its light-handed presentation of the traditions of the legal profession, courtroom anecdotes, and marginal curiosities of legal institutions, making it suitable as an introduction to legal culture or casual browsing. The prose is in the nineteenth-century English essay style, strongly narrative and not necessarily systematic, yet its very miscellany makes it easy to dip into. For readers who want to know the anecdotes of Anglo-American legal culture without reading serious textbooks, this is a small book of documentary interest. Read it as a collection of odds and ends from legal history, valuing its period tone and sources rather than treating it as rigorous scholarship.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read chapters by interest; there is no need to proceed in order from start to finish.
  2. Mark legal terms and historical names first, then look them up together afterward.
  3. Treat it as a sourcebook: excerpt usable anecdotes and note the source page.
  4. If the language feels difficult, begin with the shorter chapters to build familiarity.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35

FAQ

Is this book a systematic textbook of legal history? No. It is closer to a miscellaneous collection of legal curiosities and lawyers' anecdotes, with scattered material and entertainment taking priority; it lacks the systematic structure and pedagogical arrangement of a textbook. It suits supplementary reading or casual browsing and cannot replace a course in legal history or scholarly works.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The original is in nineteenth-century English essay style, with long sentences, and some legal terms and historical allusions require checking. Readers with university-level English reading ability who are willing to use a dictionary and notes can get through it; readers relying entirely on Chinese translation will find it tough.
What should I note when reading the electronic edition? This is a public-domain ebook, and formatting and proofreading vary by edition, so old-style spellings and punctuation may appear. Use reading software with dictionary lookup and annotation; when a word or sentence looks doubtful, check it against other public-domain editions, and do not cite a single electronic text as definitive.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.