Law reform and legal education in Interregnum England

Abstract

Having compounded as a delinquent for attending Charles I at Oxford, the common lawyer Sir Peter Ball (1598–1680) sought to make his peace with the Commonwealth. Ball’s scheme for remodelling both the law itself and legal education at the inns of court is transcribed below, together with a covering letter forwarded to Bulstrode Whitelocke in 1649. His criticisms and positive proposals provide further evidence that the traditional mode of legal education by aural learning exercises had become widely perceived by the mid seventeenth century as both pedagogically ineffective and practically irrelevant to the training of common lawyers.