Dedication to Legal History
Professor David Seipp’s 16-year pursuit to help the Year Books—the origins of English and American law—reach a wider scholarly community.
David Seipp has always had a passion for projects that seemed bigger than anyone else wanted to accomplish. The Boston University School of Law Professor and Law Alumni Scholar has dedicated much of the past 16 years to compiling and refining his database of the Year Books, English law reports collected between 1268 and 1535. Circulated as manuscripts until they began to be printed in the fifteenth century, the records are written in Law French, an Anglo-Norman language that fell out of use in the seventeenth century. The edition on which Seipp has based his research was printed in 11 volumes between 1678 and 1680.
As a whole, the Year Books reflect the development of legal doctrines, concepts, and methods recognizable in modern day common law. This immense work of scholarship indexes and paraphrases each of 22,318 records, providing a searchable database for legal historians endeavoring to trace the evolution of English and American legal concepts.
Origins
Seipp saw the need for this project well before he began it. As an undergraduate at Harvard University in the 1970s, he wrote his thesis on the history of the right to privacy in 19th century America. In his research, he came across the proverb, “a man’s house is his castle.” Intrigued, he earned a scholarship to Oxford and traveled to London to explore the origins of the phrase.
He followed the path back to a 1499 case in which a judge used the proverb. It was his first introduction to the Year Books. “I thought it was neat that I could trace it back that far,” he says. “But I wondered if the judge made it up or was quoting something well known at the time. I looked at these volumes of old cases and wondered if the proverb was there.”
His interest in the sources of the law in England, which then became the foundations of the law of America, followed him as he graduated law school and joined the law firm Foley Hoag. He kept a 1970s reprint of the Year Books on his desk, even though he says “it would have been bizarre if any legal matter had come to light that required someone finding out the law of 500 years ago or more; it’s unthinkable that I would have to go back that far as a practicing lawyer.”
When Seipp began teaching at BU Law in 1986, his research began to explore the way lawyers thought about the law as a whole. He then broke it down to its main components, and further into what is essentially the 1L curriculum, the origins of which he traced to the Roman jurist Gaius. “For an article on how we think about the concept of property, I started thinking about the use of the word,” he says. That search led him back to familiar territory as he skimmed the 11 volumes of the Year Books for the first—although not the last—time. He went through the same process for several more articles.
“After passing through the Year Books three or four times and going through the old cases, I had the opportunity to embark on this project,” he says. With support from the Ames Foundation, a legal history scholarly society based at Harvard Law School, Seipp set out translating, paraphrasing, and indexing the records.
Each Case a Puzzle
For each report, Seipp constructed a record in which he noted the attributes of each case, including the named parties, lawyers, and judges; the nature of the dispute; important legal terms, places mentioned; and—if applicable—a cross-reference to a modern scholarly edition in which the case was printed.
“It’s very satisfying work to do,” Seipp says, “although it requires a great deal of concentration. Each case is like a puzzle that needs to be solved, and there is the possibility that each case may contain a passage that nobody had focused on in many years and that might look interesting in ways nobody had noticed before.”
Seipp arranged for the project to be hosted on the BU Law website in 2003. The end result is a vast, searchable database of Year Books—a free resource that draws an average of 2,300 searches each month. These scholars come from a number of fields, including legal historians interested in the origins of English and American law, law students editing law review articles that cite medieval cases, genealogists researching family histories, and more.
As he added to the database, he discovered some oddities in early court proceedings. One case stood out when one of the lawyers replied to his opponent by barking like a dog. In another case, the same lawyer sang a piece of a ballad in court: “Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood.” “Robin Hood scholars took up my database when it was available publicly and began to write about that line,” Seipp says. “It turns out it is probably the prototype of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballad. Historians were able to reconstruct it from what that lawyer was saying and other odd manuscripts that make use of that first line.”
Seipp has taken advantage of new materials available online to identify obscure passages and names as well as to provide users of the database further avenues of exploration. For example, each record is linked to a digital image of the text, so researchers can view the report in its original law French. “It was never my intention for this database to be a stopping point,” he says. “It is a research tool, a finding aid. I always encourage people to go to the early printed editions.”
Even after 16 years of work, Seipp says there is much more to be done to enhance the utility of the index. “There are additional cases beyond the chronological Year Books, alphabetically listed abridgments, that no one has focused on for centuries,” he says. “I’ve already prepped the very earliest records, going back to 1217, but I haven’t added them yet.” Before he completes those records, however, he’ll write a volume of the Oxford History of the Laws of England. “Working on these cases one by one, it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. I’ve been doing this leaf by leaf, so it will be nice to step back and take a larger view.”
Professor Seipp discusses the origins of his project and the editorial decisions made for the Year Books database in “Big Legal History and the Hundred Year Test,” forthcoming in November in the Law and History Review.
