Communications Revolution

The Influence of Print on Legal Reasoning and the Profession

Students of communications revolutions contend that how printed material was retained and disseminated powerfully influenced legal reasoning and the legal profession's identity and apologetic agenda. Begin with legal reasoning. The notion of “binding” precedent gradually took hold in England from the late sixteenth century onward (slowly replacing the idea that judicial decisions imperfectly represented an underlying, authoritative “common erudition”). For precedents to be binding, lawyers needed to know what they were and be able to cite them to each other. Manuscript reports of cases varied one from another, and copyists could introduce errors or silent textual insertions. Manuscripts and, even more, oral tradition circulated through limited networks and could be lost over time. Printing, however, enabled standardized versions of cases to be distributed economically to practitioners and libraries, which facilitated study and citation.

Printing encouraged the development of more abstract and generalized statements of law. It reduced the mental energy devoted to simply preserving the law from generation to generation through recopying and memorizing. When lawyers could compare legal arguments and categories side by side in texts instead of recalling them laboriously and perhaps inaccurately, the logic and tensions of the concepts appeared more clearly. Printing facilitated the drawing of distinctions and subsuming of particulars into overarching categories. This helped jurists between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries reorganize [Page 213]the law by placing rules and decisions under substantive categories (such as contract, insurance, or evidence) instead of under the older, more particularistic headings of writs and remedies.

The press opened up more space for innovative or “deviant” interpretations of law. Print put a greater variety of materials before lawyers, highlighting contradictions and suggesting new lines of analysis. It kept alive the antiquated records, outdated judicial interpretations, doubts, and queries that would have gradually sunk out of view in a manuscript and oral legal culture. Young lawyers and educated laypeople could appeal to printed law books against the disapproving stares of elder practitioners. Lawyers and educated laypeople of the seventeenth century, in comparison to their predecessors of the early sixteenth century, could learn about a greater range of legal materials and interpretations, while experiencing fewer psychological and informational constraints.

Printing helped cultivate a stronger collective identity among the early modern legal profession. In the scribal and oral legal culture of late medieval England, most lawyers knew little beyond the procedures of a handful of courts. With the exception of a small group of elite practitioners centered on the Inns of Court, the majority of lawyers barely conceived of themselves as a “profession” controlling a specialized knowledge called “law.” Printing, however, helped collect and organize legal knowledge that someone could put into standardized form and distribute wherever practitioners happened to live. Law as a separate domain of knowledge became visible and tangible in printed books, which lawyers consulted in front of laypeople. This cultivated the impression that lawyers mastered not just the pleading requirements of a handful of tribunals, but a coherent body of learning. As lawyers practicing all over the country began to read the same groups of texts, they increasingly thought of themselves as bound together through a shared identity, one of the foundations of their emergence as a profession.

...