In Association with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law and the Friends of the Victoria University Library.

False attributions of authorship, unauthorized printings, competing editions and complaints about quality were hardly unusual in early-modern printing. But these problems were virtually unheard of in relation to English legal printing after the grant of the monopoly patent in the 1550s. Nevertheless, they all appear in English legal printing from around 1630, despite the continued existence of the patent. In this paper I shall present the evidence that something changed in common-law printing around 1630 and that legal printing came to look much more like other parts of the printing trade. In doing so I hope to cast some light on changes in the nature of the law patent and in the relationship between the legal profession and legal printers.

Ian Williams is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Laws at University College London and has been a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at the Huntington Library. Ian’s research interests are in early-modern legal history, in particular legal scholarship, including law books and the Inns of Court, and legal theory. These interests come together in work on legal reasoning, where legal theory and legal scholarship are applied in individual cases, mixing the history of ideas with histories of the book and reading.