The Legacy of Lord Thurlow

Dr. Adam Hofri-Winogradow (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) has published an article on SSRN entitled ‘The Moloch and Belial of the Bar’: Chancellors Thurlow and Loughborough’s Contributions to Equity and Their Posthumous Reputations.

Here is the abstract of the article:

Edward Thurlow and Alexander Wedderburn, the two last Lord Chancellors of the eighteenth century, figure in the standard histories of English law as lightweight jurists and unprincipled politicians. The article examines two of their more substantial contributions to equity: they extended the equitable protection of non-commercial debtors from their creditors, and limited the application of the Roman rule, received in English equity, holding void clauses making children’s entitlement to their portions conditional on parental consent to their choice of spouse, to children marrying during minority. The article then explains their bad posthumous reputations as a result of their contemporaries’ and nineteenth century commentators’ dislike for their naked careerism and opportunism, along with the tightening of the puritanical screws at the turn of the eighteenth century.