The Weekly Notes: Being Notes of Cases Heard and Determined by the House of Lords; The Court of Appeal; The Chancery, Queen's [Later King's] Bench, and Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Divisions of the High Court of Justice; And Cases in Bankruptcy.

Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales

Published by Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London

About this Item

[no date], 1st edition. (hardcover) Very good. 4to. 11 volumes, comprising the years 1886-1889 and 1900-1906; an incomplete run. Various paginations, the annual volumes assembled from the separately issued numbers, with the original printed wrappers retained and bound in, together with the applicable supplements, rules, advertisements, indexes, and other ancillary matter. The later volumes include the Current Index of All Cases Reported in the "Law Reports" and "Weekly Notes" During the Year, compiled by Meryon White, the final parts superseding the provisional quarterly indexes. The 1900 and 1901 volumes contain their respective final Current Index parts; the 1900 issue is explicitly designated the fifteenth year of issue and the 1901 the sixteenth. The smaller constituent issues in the 1900 and 1901 volumes are uniformly bound with the principal text. Turn-of-the-century institutional bindings of half leather over marbled boards; spines in compartments with blind bands; red morocco title compartment lettered WEEKLY NOTES, each volume with the respective year blind-stamped in black, institutional designation of the Oxford Law Association at foot. Bindings generally rubbed and scuffed; corners bumped and worn. Top edges notably dust-darkened. 1886 volume with backstrip substantially detached / loose and hinges cracked, though boards remain attached and secure. Else, volumes are substantially tight and square. Deaccessioned institutional copies, with Oxford Law Association Library stamps and other institutional markings internally; occasional earlier ownership stamps to individual constituent issues. Occasional pencil marginal notation and other contemporary pencil marks. Internally generally sound and substantially clean for working legal library copies. An incomplete but substantial 11 volume run, offered together as a set and not individually. Founded in 1866 and issued under the authority of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England and Wales, the Weekly Notes formed part of the Council's systematic effort to bring order and authority to English case reporting. Issued weekly, it provided concise and rapidly available accounts of decisions from the superior courts, including cases that might subsequently receive fuller treatment in the official Law Reports. Contemporary legal bibliography specifically notes that only the more important cases abstracted in Weekly Notes were subsequently reported at length, making the series an independent documentary source for the development and day-to-day practice of late-Victorian and Edwardian English law. The present volumes are particularly attractive as surviving working legal-library copies: rather than later facsimiles or stripped annual compilations, the separately issued numbers, printed wrappers, supplements, publishers' advertisements, rules, and annual indexing apparatus have been preserved together. Their Oxford Law Association Library provenance further documents their institutional use within the professional legal culture for which the publication was produced. The series continued from January 20, 1866 through December 26, 1952, ultimately comprising approximately ninety-five annual volumes, and was succeeded in 1953 by the Weekly Law Reports, which remains one of the principal series of English law reports.

Seller Inventory # 135514

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Weekly Notes: Being Notes of Cases Heard and Determined by the House of Lords; The Court of Appeal; The Chancery, Queen's [Later King's] Bench, and Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Divisions of the High Court of Justice; And Cases in Bankruptcy.
• Publisher: Printed by William Clowes and Sons, Limited, London
• Binding: Hardcover
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