Derek Roebuck – författare

Relations between Britain and China have, for over 150 years, been inextricably bound up with the taking of Hong Kong Island on 26 January 1841. The man responsible, Britain's plenipotentiary Captain Charles Elliot, was recalled by his government in disgrace and has been vilified ever since by China. This book describes the taking of Hong Kong from Elliot's point of view for the first time '- through the personal letters of himself and his wife Clara '- and shows a man of intelligence, conscience and humanitarian instincts. The book gives new insights into Sino-British relations of the period. Because these are now being re-assessed both historically and for the future, revelations about Elliot's role, intentions and analysis are significant and could make an important difference to our understanding of the dynamics of these relations. On a different level, the book explores how Charles the private man, with his wife by his side, experienced events, rather than how Elliot the public figure reported them to the British government. The work is therefore of great historiographical interest.

While there have been innumerable collections of humour in the courts, this is the first anthology of over 80 stories about disputes resolved without the aid of litigation. It reveals rich sources from old and new China, ancient Greece, Rome, Aesop's fables, medieval England and French vaudeville, as well as Shakespeare, Chaucer, the romantic novel and Stravinsky as arbitrator. What may surprise many is the role that women have played as arbitrators since history began.

Starting with the first substantial body of primary sources, the epics of Homer and Hesiod in the 7th century, and ending with the fall of Egypt to the Romans in 30BC, this volume describes and analyzes the development of mediation, arbitration and other ways of resolving disputes, other than litigation. New translations of more than three hundred primary sources allow you to decide for yourself whether the conclusions are valid. For the Greeks, mediation was the natural first step, the chosen third party taking the role of adjudicator only when efforts to produce a settlement had failed - and then swearing an oath and consciously adopting a different character. In some times and places, for example in Ptolemaic Egypt, the regular response of the authorities was to submit a claim to an administrative officer with the instructions: "Best to mediate; if not.." In Athens, too, in the 4th century BC, almost all civil claims went not to the courts but to public arbitrators, men who had just been relieved from military service in their 60th year. Inscriptions record their names and awards.Papyrus finds show private arbitration of construction disputes in 3rd century Egypt, with original documents startlingly like those in contemporary disputes.

Printed first in 1666, this source is both an instruction manual and plea for reform, comparing the positive potential of mediation and arbitration with the chicanery of contemporary litigation. It describes in detail some arbitrations of the period, with forms and precedents, practical examples and handy tips. The translation is intended to capture the salty and forceful style of the author, who recommends all kinds of threats and guile in his task of reconciliation and arbitration.

The authors provide the story of arbitration in Rome and its colonies from the earliest times to the codification of Justinian, with translations of all the sources.

Thirty-eight papers written over fifty years show that anyone who wants to understand law can benefit from the insights of linguistics, history and anthropology. Equally important are the techniques of other disciplines, particularly the comparative method. In Part 1 the emphases are on law reform, human rights and peace, protection of the environment, and the relations between customary law and introduced state law. Part 2 illustrates a conviction that the study of language can illuminate legal problems. It combines historical researches, intended to explode the dangerous myth that the English common law can be transacted only in the English language, with justifications of, reports on and analyses of the creation of a Chinese Digest of the common law in Hong Kong. Part 3 tries to discover, describe and understand the historical development of methods of managing disputes. Part 4 makes suggestions about the relation of theory to practice.

This is the story of how disputes of all kinds were managed in England between AD 1154 and the first signs of the Common Law, and 1558 when a new period started in the development of the English legal system. Primary sources, including private papers like the "Paston Letters", show how disputes were managed in practice. Mediation and arbitration were then natural and widespread. Their aim was to produce peace through compromise. Parties turned to the community for help: hundred and shire, magnates, city and borough guilds, university, the Church and the Jews. The king's Council and even Parliament offered mediation and arbitration. The scope included disputes not arbitrable today ownership of freehold land, status, even rape, murder and riot. Arbitration centres in London, York and Bristol offered services to all comers. Foreigners brought disputes with no connection to England. In 1484 a labourer, defended his interests in an arbitration arranged by the York authorities. The Mayor of Bristol kept an office open every day to arrange arbitrations. The Privy Council sat on a Sunday morning in February 1549 for that purpose.And women were parties almost as often as men - and occasionally mediators and arbitrators.

Despite plague, fire, political upheaval and religious strife, in the 17th century English people of all kinds used mediation and arbitration routinely to help resolve their differences. Kings and poor widows were parties. Kings and yeomen arbitrated. Francis Bacon, Edward Coke, Samuel Pepys, Robert Hooke and James I himself all took what they called arbitrament for granted as the best way of resolving all kinds of disputes they could not manage themselves. The redoubtable Lady Anne Clifford was exceptional; she successfully withstood the insistent demands of James I to arbitrate in her land dispute with her husband and family. Women appear as often as men in many of the primary sources and have a chapter to themselves. There are five parts: Part One describes the background; Part Two the subject matter: land, family and business; Part Three the people: parties and arbitrators; Part Four the law, and Part Five draws conclusions.The 17th century saw great changes in English life, but few and only towards its end in the ways in which parties managed their disputes by arbitrament, usually asking an even number of third parties, first to arrange a settlement as mediators and, if that failed, to adjudicate as arbitrators. Parties relied on bonds to ensure each other's performance of the submission and award. But, as the century drew to its close, lawyers advised their clients to take advantage of the courts' offer to accept a claim and, with the parties' consent, to refer it to arbitration, with arbitrators appointed by the court. That process came to be called a rule of court and the Government established it by the Arbitration Act 1698.

From Homer to Jane Austen, storytellers have entertained their audiences with tales of women in disputes, as parties and peacemakers. This is our attempt to write their history, relying as far as possible on primary sources, documents which have survived by chance, never intended for our eyes by those who created and preserved them.In 534AD, the Roman emperor Justinian expressly forbade women to act as arbitrators. In the thirteenth century Saint Thomas Aquinas stated that 'woman is naturally subject to man, because in man the discretion of reason predominates'.Many have assumed that what was laid down as law or proclaimed as authority represented the reality. But women do not always do what men tell them they should. We have set out to find what has happened in practice over four thousand years, at least in Europe, beginning in the Bible and Ancient Greece and Rome, but thereafter concentrating on England, with regular references to the Continent.A chapter on Anglo-Saxon England shows the inextricable ties with the Continent among women of the highest rank, as do two of the four chapters that follow on the Middle Ages. Those women often mediated and arbitrated, but they also resolved disputes by a number of other ways. Then we show how common it was for titled women in England to resolve disputes. A chapter on 'untitled women' provides plenty of evidence of the regular resolution of their disputes. There is a digression then to Malta, to the records of a fifteenth-century notary, which tell the stories of women of every station and their disputes.England's greatest monarch, Elizabeth I supported women with free legal aid and her own personal intervention, in ways never since matched. The practice of submitting women's disputes to mediation and arbitration survived through the seventeenth century, dispite revolution, regicide, fire and plague. A tailpiece tells how a dispute concerning the will of Temperance Flowerdew, one of the earliest European settlers in the 'New World', was resolved by the English Privy Council. A chapter on the eighteenth century emphasises the English government's encouragement of mediation and arbitration. ending with how Mary Musgrove's mediation helped to establish the colony of Georgia, and two sections on France, one Pre-Revolutionary, one Revolutionary. They challenge others to explore developments in the North American colonies and France. The Conclusion widens that challenge.Lady Anne Clifford, a woman of infinite strength of will, has demanded the last word. She simply refused a royal command to submit to an arbitration which would have robbed her of the vast landholdings she held in her own right.

Our Early Modern period runs from 1700 to 1815. England was never at peace. The Act of Settlement 1701, whatever it did for the Constitution, did not end the fighting between English and Scots. Bonnie Prince Charlie was not seen off until Culloden in 1748. George Washington became president of a new country in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. Britain was intermittently at war with France or Spain. Yet the primary sources show that parties with disputes got on with their resolution in the same old ways, by arbitration and mediation.After an introduction, describing the social, economic, political and legal background, the individual documents which make up the primary sources are each examined, including court records, law reports, newspapers and memoirs. The practices of mediation and arbitration across various sectors of eighteenth-century England are explored. First the services offered by the State, primarily by Justices of the Peace but also by all the courts. Then the bulk of the work is devoted to private arbitration and mediation, including extensive sections on Commerce, Labour Relations, the London Theatre, Families and Property, Architects and Engineers, Sport and Betting, with an extended section devoted to the work of women. The lives of individuals in all strata of English society are revealed. Finally, a long chapter describes what has been called legalisation and professionalisation, showing the increasing involvement of lawyers.

More Disputes and Differences: Essays on the History of Arbitration and its Continuing Relevance, is the last volume worked on by Derek Roebuck, though not quite completed before his death in 2020. It has, therefore, been prepared for publication by his widow, and sometimes co-author, women's historian Susanna Hoe. It comprises articles, lectures and chapters dating from his 2010 volume Disputes and Differences: Comparisons in Law, Language and History. But, whereas the chapters of that earlier, thematic work were quite disparate, this book, particularly in part 1, 'The Past', encompasses the history of arbitration and mediation from prehistory to the early nineteenth century. What makes this volume particularly interesting is that it is possible, as chapter follows chapter, to deduce which of Derek Roebuck's multi-volume histories he was working on at the time, and what other works he was reading or hearing then. This is illustrated by the last essay in Part 1 - 'A Pinch of Reality: Private Dispute Resolution in 18th Century England (2019)'.Part 2 - 'Past, Present and Future' (2013) - starts with 'The Future of Arbitration' (2013) which embodies just that, ending with 'Keeping an Eye on Fundamentals' (2012). Part 3 - 'Language, Research and Comparison', features works that bow to the author's particular interests and their connection to arbitration and its history. And he had a rule that, where possible, he would suggest what research still needed to be done, hence 'ADR in Business: Topics for Research' (2012). The final chapter - 'Return to that Other Country: Legal History and Comparative Law' (2019) - one of the last pieces written, says it all.

The use of cheques and other banking instruments in Hong Kong and the law which applies to them are described.