Joshua Tate

Este artículo pretende aportar al entendimiento de la relación entre el procedimiento judicial y el proceso mediante jurado en Estados Unidos. Para ello, se analizar el origen tanto del procedimiento judicial como del juicio ante jurado en el siglo XII en el las década previas a la promulgación de la Carta Magna. Finalmente, se concluye con un análisis acerca la implementación del derecho a un juicio a través de jurado y se argumenta que esto no se debe Carta Magna per sé, sino al Cuarto Concilio de Letrán.

During the second half of the twelfth century, powerful and charismatic bishops presented a threat to the emerging jurisdiction of the king’s courts. By contrast, King John was able to fill key episcopal vacancies with loyal bureaucrats who acted as servants to the king. This article examines how the assertion and subsequent cession of power by English bishops under the Angevin kings shaped the developing jurisdiction of the common-law courts, particularly in disputes over advowsons, or rights of presentation to churches. The evidence suggests that the bishops played a significant role in the development of the early common law, first by sending litigation into the king’s courts and later by declining to challenge the primacy of royal jurisdiction.

The recent rise of perpetual trusts has brought new attention to previously obscure state constitutional prohibitions of perpetuities. This symposium commentary examines the historical origins of the first such prohibition, Clause 23 of the 1776 North Carolina Constitution and Declaration of Rights, which provided that “perpetuities and monopolies are contrary to the genius of a free State, and ought not to be allowed.” Although many good reasons can be offered for the provision, it is curiously absent from the constitutions of the twelve other original states. Why did this provision emerge only in North Carolina, and not in Virginia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or any of the other “free states” that together rose up against their colonial masters?

This commentary suggests a possible answer to that question. Although the problems with perpetuities were well known to learned inhabitants of all the newly independent American states, those problems were particularly salient in North Carolina in 1776 due to that colony’s unique history as a former proprietary colony. The decision by the heir of one of the original Lords Proprietors not to sell his share back to the British crown gave rise to specific grievances in North Carolina that did not exist in the other twelve former colonies. Moreover, North Carolina was unique in witnessing a violent confrontation between the colonial authorities and backcountry farmers that stemmed in part from those grievances. The peculiar case of the Earl Granville and assorted problems in his Granville District shifted the problem of perpetuities from the periphery to the center of North Carolina politics in the late eighteenth century, and made perpetuities warrant an explicit mention in the 1776 North Carolina Constitution and Declaration of Rights.

The writ of quare impedit was, until the mid-nineteenth century, a standard real action for the recovery of advowsons. This article argues that the writ was most likely created between 1187 and 1196, and that it was, at least in part, a response to pressure from religious houses that acquired advowsons by charter of gift and were precluded from bringing