Wager of law
idea · 3 works · 3 mentions · 5 anchored passages
wager of law · compurgation
in the texts
Institutes of Roman Law
An English procedural vestige of Germanic compurgation, allowing a defendant to clear himself by oath with compurgators.
of which institution we have a vestige in the Wager of law, which was recently an incident of the action of Detinue, in which the defendant might clear himself by his own oath and that of eleven compurgators.
The Genius of the Common Law
The late medieval survival of archaic oath-proof, persisting as a discouraged remnant within the developing common law.
Remnants of archaism, wager of law and such like, hung about the older forms of action.
Proof by oath lingered through the Middle Ages, and much later, in the wager of law, but in so many ways hampered and discouraged that it is already something of a curiosity in the sixteenth century.
The Law of Torts
An old mode of defence/proof (compurgation) in debt, whose availability shaped the displacement of debt by assumpsit and trover.
Because of the wager of law assumpsit supplanted debt;
It was, for instance, a rule that the executor could not be sued in debt if the testator could have waged his law.