The Inns of Court, England's “third university,” have not received their scholarly due, considering the importance of the common lawyers they trained in many developments of the early modern period. Paul Raffield, now a lecturer at Warwick Law School, helps address this gap with his study of the Inns’ semiotic significance in the years from 1558 to 1660. Four of the book's seven chapters are based on articles previously published in law journals, and the whole is a revision of a dissertation completed under Peter Goodrich's supervision at Birkbeck School of Law. Its sources derive largely from the published records of the Inns and the writings of such members of the legal canon as Sir John Fortescue, Christopher St. German, and Sir Edward Coke. Any expectations of an internalist legal history raised by the book's lawyerly credentials are quickly dispelled, however: this is a theoretically informed exercise in cultural history. Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, along with key critical legal theorists such as Goodrich, jostle with Sir William Dugdale and John Selden in the notes.

Raffield effectively challenges characterizations of the English common law as wholly insular and indigenous. Like other aspects of Renaissance culture, the common law came under the influence of a mix of continental, classical, and Christian currents. Raffield argues that lawyers drew on Christian theology and Neoplatonic humanism to craft in the Inns a microcosm of the ideal English state. He explores how the legal community, represented in the autonomous collegiate structure of the Inns, made visible the unwritten Ancient Constitution. Everything from their dress, rituals of dinner, architecture, entertainments, education, and governance provides fodder for analysis. In Raffield's hands, for example, masques and revels become legal texts capable of asserting the role of the law (and lawyers) in containing the aggrandized claims of the monarch. Although the audience for and reception of such signs receive little attention, Raffield suggests that these representations fostered a perception of the law's legitimacy and hence consent to its claims. “Through the various signs of its legitimacy and sovereignty,” he argues, “the English Constitution was consciously developed to represent the indivisibility of divine law and common law within a classically ordered cosmos” (1). Under King Charles, however, the Inns succumbed to royal interference. The Caroline revels conveyed an acceptance of the barristers’ subordinate status or were canceled altogether. The Inns’ autonomy and corporate life suffered further in the civil war years, with few or no admissions, residents, exercises, or readings. Their fortunes revived somewhat after the execution of the king, and a residuum of their humanist commonwealth principles can be detected in the constitutional debates of the Cromwellian years, but thereafter political and legal philosophy moved in new directions.

The book contains a number of fresh and thought-provoking observations, particularly in its discussion of dress and dinner rituals. The prose, however, is unduly difficult and disjointed. At times, linkages are tenuous and based on unsupported assertions. The semiotic approach, as used here, can sometimes seem to explain too much too neatly. The chapter on architecture, for example, gives little concrete description of the Inns’ appearance with which to evaluate its claims and finds support for the book's arguments wherever it looks. It posits that the Inns’ architectural development in the Tudor years, with walls and elaborate gates, reflected the walled city states of ancient Greece. As such, the architecture demonstrates the influence of Neoplatonic humanism on the common-law tradition. Of course, some of the core components of the Inns dated from the Middle Ages, but these too have their place. The foundations of the Inner and Middle Temple were laid by the Knights Templar, who had helpfully set about delineating the body of common law well before the Inns of Court began. Other constructions that might seem to mar the perception of the Inns as an orderly, utopian city state with their eclecticism in fact mirror the “indistinct nature of the Ancient Constitution” (63). Collectively, old and new represent the blending of Christian and classical influences on the common law. Yet, Raffield is generally careful to qualify suggestions of intentional design and to use terms such as “mirror,” “correlate,” and “represent,” frequently working through allusion and suggestive similarities rather than demonstrating or insisting upon instances of concrete connection. This is, after all, an exercise in reading signs, the significance of which depends as much on the viewer as on the creator.

While the book might at times frustrate those wedded to older conventions of historical writing, it valuably brings to light a broadened range of legal texts worthy of analysis. It also ably restores the common law to a culture shaped by humanist influences, demonstrating that the much-publicized conflict between civil and common law did not foreclose continental influences on the latter and on the Ancient Constitution it supported.