Professor David Seipp Selected to Deliver Oxford University’s Youard Lecture in Legal History
The distinguished professor of legal history spoke about his work with medieval English law.
On March 10, Law Alumni Scholar and Professor of Law David Seipp delivered the Richard Youard Lecture in Legal History, an endowed lecture series given at the Oxford University Faculty of Law. The Youard Lecture was set up by a distinguished City solicitor and graduate of Magdalen College, with the goal of presenting topics in legal history that will be accessible to all law students and give them insights into their studies of modern law.
Seipp’s talk, entitled “When Lawyers Lie: Forging an English Constitution in 1399,” examines the first Year Book case under the reign of Henry IV. The 1399 Year Book case recounts the trial and beheading of an earl for treason. The Year Book entry is widely regarded as a lie, with many scholars accepting a theory that the entry is a later forgery inserted into the Year Book. In his talk, Seipp argues that the case was “fabricated by the lawyers of 1399 as a report of what should have happened.”
“Trials of earls who challenged the king were something that should be subject to orderly proceedings, but not in the ordinary courts of law,” Seipp says. “Decision by a majority of peers, unsworn and voting their individual consciences, was enough to separate these political trials from the work of the ordinary courts and to save judges and lawyers from having to take sides in these times of dynastic rivalries.”
Professor Seipp’s scholarship focuses on law, lawyers, and legal proceedings in medieval England, especially on the Year Books, a collection of law reports that record the earliest courtroom arguments in the common law tradition. Through the Year Books, Seipp interprets the roles of judges, lawyers and jurors in the development of medieval English common law, and the persistence and evolution of basic legal concepts throughout the centuries.
Seipp is well-known for his digital edition of the Year Books, Medieval English Legal History: An Index and Paraphrase of Printed Year Book Reports, 1266–1535. The project is supported by the Ames Foundation of Harvard Law School, and records more than 22,000 early English legal cases. “The project is fascinating because it brings me into direct and intimate contact with the primary sources from the earliest formative period of English and American common law, most of which have not been printed since 1679,” Seipp says. He is also working on the fifth volume of The Oxford History of the Laws of England.
Previous scholars invited to deliver the Youard Lecture in Legal History include Reinhard Zimmermann of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Douglas Hay of Osgoode Hall Law School, Michael Lobban of the London School of Economics, David Ibbetson of Cambridge University Faculty of Law, William Nelson of New York University School of Law and Catharine MacMillan of the University of Reading School of Law.
