Thursday 23 November 2006 at 12:50
Oxford Legal History Forum
Estate Preservation and Preserving Estates: Protection of Family Property Against Creditors in the Late Eighteenth-Century Chancery.
Speaker: Adam Hofri-Winogradow, Somerville
Venue: Oxford Law Faculty Room 4 in the St Cross Building.
All are very welcome. Sandwiches will be provided from 12.50, and the talk will be from 20-30 minutes long, with opportunity for discussion afterwards.
Abstract:
The late eighteenth century English court of Chancery protected debtors, who held property in a non-business context, against their creditors. The court extended its policy of keeping family property in family hands far beyond conventional conjugal families: lonely widows and widowers, unmarried women and men, nephews, nieces and cousins of childless decedents, and even generic groups of "relatives" were all accorded a radical protection, which could go to the extent of the court purposely disappointing a testator's creditors, even where that testator expressly directed that his debts were to be paid before any sum was transferred to his surviving family members. All types of property were so protected: not only landed estates, but any type of personal property too. The recipients of Chancery's protection make a wide cross-section of British society, from the nobility to humble merchants and professionals; it was not a predominantly aristocratic court.
The substantive work of Chancery during this period has been curiously understudied. Modern research has largely reproduced a traditional Victorian Benthamite discourse focused on the court's inadequate procedure. Most research of the substance of English law during the High Enlightenment has focused on the law of trade and the common law courts; a rivulet has focused on women's rights and property. My paper attempts to redress this imbalance by studying one of Chancery's key substantive policies in the law of family property, then the most lucrative and best-developed area of English law, now little studied by modern legal historians except for questions of women's property. The Enlightenment-era Chancery's strong protection of families' property provides a useful comparative perspective on the present-day discourse of protecting families and the values associated with them.
Organised by the Oxford Legal History Forum
