Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods

Home >
Law >
Legal History >
Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods

Description
Contents

Details

Monetary law is essential to the functioning of private transactions and international dealings by the state: nearly every legal transaction has a monetary aspect.

Money in the Western Legal Tradition presents the first comprehensive analysis of Western monetary law, covering the civil law and Anglo-American common law legal systems from the High Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century.

Weaving a detailed tapestry of the changing concepts of money and private transactions throughout the ages, the contributors investigate the special contribution made by legal scholars and practitioners to our understanding of money and the laws that govern it.

Divided in five parts, the book begins with the coin currency of the Middle Ages, moving through the invention of nominalism in the early modern period to cashless payment and the rise of the banking system and paper money, then charting the progression to fiat money in the modern era. Each part commences with an overview of the monetary environment for the historical period written by an economic historian or numismatist.

These are followed by chapters describing the legal doctrines of each period in civil and common law. Each section contains examples of contemporary litigation or statute law which engages with the distinctive issues affecting the monetary law of the period.

This interdisciplinary approach reveals the distinctive conception of money prevalent in each period, which either facilitated or hampered the implementation of economic policy and the operation of private transactions.

1. Introduction
2. Money as a Legal Institution

PART I. COINS AND THE LAW
Currency Depreciation and Debasement in Medieval Europe
Money in Medieval Philosophy
Money in the Roman Law Texts
The Legists' Doctrines on Money and the Law, Eleventh to Fifteenth Centuries
Money in Medieval Canon Law
The Spanish Scholastics on Money and Credit
Gabriel Biel's Monetary Theory
The 'Reduction' of Money in the Low Countries, c. 1489-1515

PART II. MONEY IN THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD: INVENTING NOMINALISM
Monetary Reforms in the Holy Roman Empire, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
The Enforcement of Nominal Values of Money in Medieval and Early Modern Common Law
The Case of Mixt Monies (1604)
The Effects of Debasements on Debts in Early Modern Jurisprudence
German Law Faculties and Benches of Jurymen (Schoffenstuhle) on Loans and Inflation: Legal Doctrine and Seventeenth Century Legal Practice
Early Modern Monetary Policy in the Light of Contemporary Adjudication

PART III. THE EMERGENCE OF CASHLESS PAYMENT: BANK MONEY
Early Public Banks I: Ledger Money Banks
The Order to Pay Money in Medieval Continental Europe
Early English Law of Checks
'Bank Money': The Rise, Fall, and Metamorphosis of the 'Transferable Deposit in Common Law
Giro Payments and the Beginning of the Modern Cashless Payment System

PART IV. THE EMERGENCE OF PAPER MONEY
Early Public Banks II: Banks of Issue
Deposit Banking and the Use of Monetary Instruments
Early English Law of Bank Notes
Bank Notes and their Vindication in Eighteenth Century Scotland
Multiple Currency Clauses and Currency Reform: The Austrian Coupon Cases

PART V. FIAT MONEY
Putting the 'System' in the International Monetary System
The Bretton Woods System: Design and Operation
Hyper-Inflations in the Early Twentieth Century
From the State Theory of Money to Modern Monetary Theory
Responses to Crisis: Re-configuring the Monetary and the Fiscal in the Great Depression
Monetary Obligations and the Fragmentation of the Sterling Monetary Union
The German Hyper-Inflation of the 1920s
Case Study: Swedish Government Bonds, their Gold Dollar Clause and the 1933 Roosevelt Act