Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

76 Legal History in the Making
entry for reclaiming land when a leasehold tenant held over. It is, first, part
of human law, not divine; positive, not natural law; common law, not civil or
canon; suits at law, not 'parts' of the law; at the courts of Westminster, not
county or lower courts; to draw some new thing in suit, not to defeat a prior
suit; a common plea, not a plea of the crown; a real action, not personal;
purely real, not mixed; a plea of land, not 'in the realty' for hereditaments
or real choses; a praecipe quod reddat, not mort d'ancestor or nuper obiit; in
the right, not ancestral possessory; but mixed in the right, not demanding the
right; a writ of entry without tort, not from tort; on determination of an estate,
not disability in making a grant; for an estate ended, not a condition broken;
and finally, seventeen layers deep, it is a writ ad terminum qui praeteriit, not
ad communem legem.
Here was classification! Finch put nearly all of his effort into devising ever
more elaborate distinctions within divisions. The patient reader who followed
all the way down each maze often found very little information collected
around each of the bottommost elements of law, just some snippets of
statutes, blackletter rules from the reports, and exceptions, of course, for
the king's prerogative. The classification itself was clearly the greater part
of what Finch was trying to accomplish in his treatment of the common law.
Who was Henry Finch? By 1613, when he published Nomotexnia, Henry
Finch had been at Gray's Inn as student, apprentice and bencher for some
thirty-five years. He had an active practice and held important retainers and
recorderships. 73 His work was clearly meant for students of the common law,
both absolute beginners and those far enough along in study to see the need
for a view of the whole. 74 Yet Finch, in his own way, brought to the common
law the perspective of a university-trained scholar.
Finch had been a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, where his tutor
was Laurence Chaderton, England's first and leading exponent of Ramist
logic. 75 Ramus (Pierre de la Ramee) and his followers elevated 'method'
above all other aspects of logic and promoted it as a new short-cut to
universal knowledge. 76 It will not oversimplify matters to put the Ramist
programme this way: Law, like other bodies of knowledge, was complex.
What was complex was complex because it was made up of many things,
but no matter how complex, it presented a few simple, obvious divisions.
If one divided up what was complex into, say, two or three parts, on the
basis of some simple division, each part was already less complex than
73 Prest, 'Dialectical Origins', 329.
74 Cf. F.H. Lawson, 'Institutes', Festschrift fur Imre Zajtay, R.H. Graveson et al., ed. (Tubingen,
1982), 341; 'Stair from an English Standpoint', Stair Tercentenary Studies, D.M. Walker, ed., Stair
Society, xxx (Edinburgh, 1981), 228 ('It [could] be read only by learned lawyers, and even by them
not continuously').
75 Prest, 'Dialectical Origins', 330-31; Knafla, 'Ramism and the English Renaissance', 35-36.
76 Knafla, 'Ramism and the English Renaissance', 34; E.J. Ashworth, Language and Logic in the
Post-Medieval Period (Dordrecht, Boston, Reidel, 1974), 15.