David Starkey on English history and English law

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David Starkey on English history and English law

06 May 2010

Speakers: David Starkey

Historian David Starkey explores the inherent individuality of English Law relative to rival European systems.

Starkey begins by stating that the founding domestic interest in English Law began in the reign of Henry II and was based on three principles: coherence, difference, and universality. Scholars persevered to establish an English – rather than Scottish or British – legal system of both significance and international respect. Compared with the the deductive European system, English law is inductive and foundational. England’s legal product is a sentiment of participation, belonging, and right over a mutually constructed law. This contract gives Englishmen a shared bond as well as a moral obligation to obey. It is this possessive element, Starkey says, which allowed English Law to claim dominion beyond its geographical boundaries, whether in Ireland, in Italy, or elsewhere across Europe.

In a highly politicised act, Henry VIII rewrote English history to move away from a legal system based on torture towards one prioritising the sovereignty of the individual soul, one dependent on consent. Euroscepticism, then, is far from new; it is this scepticism, Starkey concludes, which protects and enfolds the English legal system, and which now finds itself under threat from attempts to undermine it.

This was a Protimos event with Intelligence Squared as media partner. Protimos is an organisation of lawyers who work to provide access to law for indigenous and marginalised communities in the developing world. Protimos works to empower poor communities in finding a legal voice and enabling them to derive economic benefits from their natural resources and gradually to emerge from poverty.