The Crown as Corporation

Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice

“…42 Edward Wynne also resorted to history to explain the anomalous rule that a person who entered another's land, cut his corn, and took it away, was only guilty of a bare trespass, whereas a person who took away corn which had already been cut 39 Calvin's Case (1608) 7 Coke Report 1a at 12a. 40 Maitland pointed out that on the demise of the king, when many public offices were vacated, a[ll] litigation not only came to a stop but had to start again ' Maitland (1911), vol. 3, p. 253.…”

Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere

“…The corporation sole had long been 'a curious freak of English law', as a concept that would help with maintaining the continuity of church property by designating an ecclesiastically sanctioned individual as holding the 'fee simple' or title to a piece of church land not as a 'person' but as legal entity (Maitland, 1901: 131;Maitland, 1900;O'Hara, 1988). Most commonly, for example, a bishop would own church property as cleric, who was a man but was also the 'secular, legal embodiment of the church' (Maitland, 1900(Maitland, , 1901O'Hara, 1988). As Perry Dane has argued, the corporation sole was an individual who was a collective representation, poised at the juncture of secular and church power as an 'extraordinary, irregular, custom-tailored effort at translating religious principles into secular terms' (Dane, 1998: 58).…”

German roots of the theory of pluralism

“…Not all of the early English and American pluralists followed Gierke's reasoning, to be sure. Maitland (1911) and Figgis (1913) adhered most closely to Gierke, Barker (1934) was the most critical, and others, like Laski, mostly ignored him. But almost everyone found it useful to refer to Gierke quite often in order to build a solid historical base for more modern assertions.…”