Lord Bacon
historical figure · 3 works · 3 mentions · 5 anchored passages
Bacon
in the texts
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
Statesman to whom the tract on the 'Use of the Law' is popularly but wrongly attributed
The tract on the ‘Use of the Law’ appears to be wrongly attributed to Lord Bacon, who has elsewhere shown that he had much sounder ideas than its writer of the true history of English institutions.
The popular theory of the origin of Copyhold, or at all events the theory in which most lawyers are educated, is explicitly set forth in a tract on the ‘Use of the Law,’ commonly printed in collections of the writings of Lord Bacon (Spedding’s edition, vol.
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
An English jurist cited as corroborating Lord Coke's view of the common law's simplicity.
“There is that great simplicity and plainness in the Common Law, that Lord Coke has gone so far as to assert, (and Lord Bacon nearly seconds him in observing,) that ‘he never knew two questions arise merely upon common law;
The Law of Intellectual Property
Lord Camden's predecessor as Chancellor, invoked as an authority holding that reason, not mere precedent, should govern new legal questions.
“Let reason be a fruitful, and custom a barren thing.
Lord Camden’s great predecessor in the chancellorship, Lord Bacon, inculcated no such narrow and absurd ideas, as to the necessity of precedents, or their authority to deprive mankind of the benefits of whatever knowledge they might afterwards acquire.
It requires no words to prove which was the greater philosopher of the two—Lord Bacon, when he said that mankind did not know every thing from the beginning, and that, in judging of new questions, reason should be allowed to be a fruitful, and custom but a barren, source of authority;