The “who” of a lawsuit, who can sue and who can be sued, has long been a fundamental issue of process. Lengthy discussions of the issue are found in Roman law texts of eighteen centuries ago and in succeeding centuries in texts influenced by Roman law. In Roman law texts, the “who” of a lawsuit was discussed in the same context and, most importantly, with the same seeming concern as the fundamental issues of whether the court had authority over the parties and whether the court had competence over the subject matter. The same is true for many of the texts influenced by Roman law.

One bright, sunny day in northern Italy, let us say in Bologna in the year 1275, a group of law students might have sat and listened to this case. A man named Seius slipped into a shed owned by his sworn enemy, Titius. A priest, a wealthy merchant, and a physician, all of them unimpeachable witnesses, saw Seius enter the shed with his sword drawn. A moment later they heard a man cry out. Then they clearly saw Seius, shaken and pallid, emerge through the doorway, bloody sword in hand. When Seius noticed the witnesses coming toward him, he fled. The witnesses found Titius in the shed, unconscious, dying from a sword wound. Upon investigation, the podestà, the magistrate charged with criminal investigations, discovered that Seius had recently sworn that he would kill Titius, and further, that everyone in town believed that he was guilty. The podestà ordered his arrest and, after a manhunt, Seius was captured before he could slip across the border to the neighboring city-state.

In the spring of 1789, officials elected under the Constitution met in New York to begin the work of organizing the new federal government. The federalists had won the battle for ratification, but the war to establish an accepted and respected federal structure was yet to be won. The opponents of centralized government had been subdued, but not conquered. Issues that had caused heated debate in the Constitutional Convention and in the state ratifying conventions lay just beneath the surface and could be revived easily. Any resurgence could shake the foundation of the new federal edifice.

The influence on the Canadian political culture of two conflicting tendencies in common-law constitutional thought, constitutionalism and legalism, merits attention. By constitutionalism, I mean a particular response to the apprehended infringement of civil rights and liberties by the state: an appeal to standards of state conduct that are supposedly sanctified by long usage, implied contract, or both. By legalism, I mean the justification of alleged infringements by invoking the lawfulness of the authority by which such actions are taken. These definitions deviate from common usage, but they serve to represent a dichotomy within common-law constitutional thought that has been crucial to the development of the English political culture and of cultures derived from the English.

The language of the common law has a life and a logic of its own, resilient through eight centuries of unceasing talk. Basic terms of the lawyer's specialized vocabulary, elementary conceptual distinctions, and modes of argument, which all go to make “thinking like a lawyer” possible, have proved remarkably durable in the literature of the common law. Two fundamental distinctions—between “real” and “personal” actions and between “possessory” and “proprietary” remedies—can be traced back to their early use in treatises of the first generations of professional common law judges and in reports of courtroom dialogue from the first generations of professional advocates in common law courts. Together these distinctions give the clearest indications that the early common law professions borrowed the vocabulary and techniques of Roman and canon law. Moreover, they play an important role in the ongoing historical debate over English legal concepts of property ownership.

Over thirty years ago, Leonard Levy, building explicitly on suggestions first offered by Walter Nelles, and implicitly on observations made by Roscoe Pound, commented on the unusual conjunction of two decisions announced within weeks of each other in 1842 by Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The cases, Farwell v. Boston & Worcester Railroad which helped create the fellow servant rule in the United States, and Commonwealth v. Hunt, which involved a prosecution for criminal conspiracy for organizing a labor union as a closed shop, seemed at odds. Hunt appeared to expand worker rights to collective action, while Farwell appeared to restrict worker rights to compensation from workplace injuries. Shaw's apparent protection of a worker's right to organize, “a pro-worker stance,” seemed to conflict with his refusal to recognize a worker's right to recover for an industrial accident in particular circumstances, “an anti-worker stance.” The question is obvious—how can these decisions be made compatible, or does their incompatibility have to be accepted with a shrug of the shoulders and a nod toward the evolutionary progress of the common law?