Landmarks of Law Reporting 6 -- First Chancery reports

William Tothill (1560-1627), The Transactions of the High Court of Chancery, Both by Practice and President (London, 1671).

Although reports of Chancery cases had occasionally appeared in manuscript Year Books and various printed case reports, Tothill’s Transactions of the High Court of Chancery (1st ed. 1649) was the first printed collection devoted exclusively to Chancery cases. Van Vechten Veeder described them as “extremely brief and unsatisfactory, often giving merely a bare statement of the facts of a cases and the final decree, without any indication of the grounds of the judgment” (“The English Reports, 1292-1865,” 15 Harvard Law Review 1, 112 (1901)). Decent Chancery reports did not appear until the dawn of the 18th century.

MIKE WIDENER

Rare Book Librarian

“Landmarks of Law Reporting” is on display April through October 2009 in the Rare Book Exhibition Gallery, Level L2, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School.