L’editoria giuridica in Inghilterra e lo »strano caso« dei Named Reports (XV–XVI sec.)

Abstract

The essay examines the relationship between the advent and diffusion of print in England and English legal literature with particular reference to the law reports. Since the last decades of the fifteenth century the Year Books were widely printed while, on the contrary, the Named Reports remained unpublished until the end of the sixteenth century. The article, through an analysis of the mode, time and characters of the diffusion of print in England, tries to understand why. If the late publication of the Named Reports could be partially explained by their extreme technicality and, at the same time, with the common lawyers’ habit of compiling their own collections of cases privately for their own use, the very content of the collections – which generally referred to recent juridical matters, were in continual need of revision and updating, and were normally well known inside the small and exclusive circle of the common lawyers – probably made their printing inappropriate and unnecessary. With the development of the doctrine of stare decisis in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries things would change: English lawyers started looking for authority in uniform and reliable printed texts, which consequently led English printers to publish the Named Reports in considerable numbers.