Why England ran a second court system to fix the first one's rigid rules
In 1818 Lord Eldon vowed that Chancery would never deserve the old jibe that its justice varied like the length of the Chancellor's foot. That insult captured a real problem. England had built an entire parallel body of law, called equity, to rescue people from common law courts that followed procedure straight into unfairness.
After the Norman Conquest, royal justice sat in three central courts: King's Bench, Common Pleas and the Exchequer. Cases began with a royal writ, bought from the Chancery headed by the Lord Chancellor. At first a writ was little more than a loose order to do right by the plaintiff, but during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the system hardened. The Provisions of Oxford in 1258 barred the Chancellor from inventing new writs without the King and his council, and each fixed writ led to a fixed kind of judgment. A wrong that fitted no writ had no remedy.
By the fourteenth century the Chancery itself was hearing such cases. Chancellors, often trained in theology, canon law and Roman law, borrowed from the Roman idea of aequitas, which Praetors had used to soften rigid civil law, and ultimately from Aristotle's epieikeia, a correction for laws too general to be fair in a given case. Early petitions begged for help out of divine love and charity, and by the late fifteenth century lawyers called Chancery a court of conscience.
Critics hated the discretion. Thomas Wolsey, Chancellor from 1515 to 1529, had no legal training and enjoyed putting lawyers down. After the nonlawyer Thomas Wriothesley was accused in 1546 of smuggling civil law into Chancery, the Crown shifted toward appointing common lawyers. From 1660 Chancery cases were regularly reported, and equity began hardening into precedent.
Friction between the two systems peaked in 1615. Litigants shopped between courts, Chancery injunctions could block common law judgments on pain of prison, and Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke answered by issuing habeas corpus writs to free people jailed for contempt of Chancery. In the Earl of Oxford's case, a ruling made on the authority of James I settled that equity prevails whenever the two conflict. The Judicature Acts of the late nineteenth century merged the courts but kept equity alive as its own set of rules, covering trusts, injunctions, fiduciary duties and estoppel.
Source: Equity (law)
