Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
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Piyel Haldar
Piyel Haldar teaches law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specialises in early modern legal history. His current research investigates the emblematic forms of legal argument during the European renaissance and the evolution of law as a global network of discourse during the same period. His most recent publication is “The Tongue and the Eye; Eloquence and Office in Renaissance Humanism” in
Genealogies of Legal Vision , eds. Peter Goodrich and Valerie Hayaert (Routledge 2015).
Abstract
This paper argues for a re-evaluation of the manner in which conscience is used by equity lawyers. Debates by early modern humanists sought an alignment between conscience and public office. Indeed, conscience had very little to do with the private morals or private compunction of the Chancellor. Rather, conscience was implicated at the level of duty, honestas and dignity. It required stricter attention to the metaphysics of public official conduct. In these terms, conscience was a humanist re-evaluation of a classical idea that gave heavier emphasis to the poesis of vision.
About the author
Piyel Haldar teaches law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specialises in early modern legal history. His current research investigates the emblematic forms of legal argument during the European renaissance and the evolution of law as a global network of discourse during the same period. His most recent publication is “The Tongue and the Eye; Eloquence and Office in Renaissance Humanism” in Genealogies of Legal Vision, eds. Peter Goodrich and Valerie Hayaert (Routledge 2015).
©2016 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Equity and the Resources of Critique: Part I
- “Where the Shoe Pinches”: True Equity in Trollope’s The Warden
- Equity as a Question of Decorum and Manners: Conscience as Vision
- Millenaristic Equity. Theological Order and Legal Faith
- “… and if, in time, equity…”. An Exploration of the Time(s) of Equity Diagrammed through Image
- “From their Graves”: The Theme of Burial and the Work of the Modern Jurist in F. W. Maitland’s Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law
- Research
- Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper: New Definitions of Human Dignity in Novel and Film
- Intertextuality and Parody of Law in The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien: a Literary and a Linguistic Reading
- Book Review
- Gary Watt: Shakespeare’s Acts of Will: Law, Testament and Properties of Performance
