An Abridgement of the Statutes of Ireland, From the First Session.

Dublin: Printed by George Abraham Grierson, 1754. The Transatlantic Legacy of Jonathan Belcher: The 1754 Abridgement of the Statutes of Ireland Bullingbrooke, Edward and Jonathan Belcher, Compilers. An Abridgement of the Statutes of Ireland, From the First Session of Parliament in the Third Year of the Reign of King Edward the Second, To the End of the Twenty Fifth Year of the Reign of His Present Majesty King George the Second; And of All the English and British Statutes which Extend to and Bind Ireland; With Tables of the Statutes in their Chronological Order. Together with an Alphabetical Table of the Principal Matters Referring to the Titles and Paragraphs in the Abridgement, And to the Respective Statutes; And also the New Rules. Dublin: Printed by George Abraham Grierson, 1754. Only edition. Quarto (10" x 8"; 254 x 203 mm). xii, [xxiv], 977; [351] pp. Early 20th-century tan institutional buckram, red and black morocco lettering pieces to spine, endpapers renewed. Ex-library copy with a discrete shelf location label to the foot of the spine, property stamp to the title page "Association of the Bar City of New York Library," standard cataloging annotations to its verso, and return stamps to the rear pastedown. A very good copy. $350. * A comprehensive mid-eighteenth-century digest of Irish legislation and imperial statutory control, compiled jointly by prominent Dublin civil lawyer Edward Bullingbrooke and Harvard-educated jurist Jonathan Belcher. This volume serves as a vital artifact of the legal framework governing the Protestant Ascendancy, systematically indexing Irish parliamentary enactments alongside English statutes binding upon the Kingdom of Ireland under Poynings' Law and the Declaratory Act of 1720. The extensive apparatus is especially notable for administrative and social historians: it features distinct tables cross-referencing Irish acts derived from English models, statutes required to be charged at the Assizes and Quarter-Sessions, and penal and civic decrees explicitly enjoined to be read aloud from church pulpits to ensure public compliance. For collections of early Americana and colonial law, co-compiler Jonathan Belcher would be appointed the first Chief Justice of Nova Scotia the same year this volume was published. Belcher famously utilized this exact expertise in statutory synthesis to draft the foundational laws of Nova Scotia, m.…