SOURCE: Pawlisch, Hans S. “Sir John Davies, the Ancient Constitution and Civil Law.” In Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism, pp. 161-75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

In the following excerpt, Pawlisch looks at legal influences on Davies's Le Primer Report des Cases et Matters Resolves en les Courts del Roy en Ireland, here referred to by the title Irish Law Reports.

The chapters dealing with the case of the Bann fishery and the case of mixed money have demonstrated how Sir John Davies, as Irish Attorney-General, supported both private and public interests in Irish litigation through argument from Roman law. In these and other cases in the Reports, Davies' use of continental law was so extensive as to cast doubt upon the conventional notions of an insular common law mentality put forward by Professor J. G. A. Pocock. In his well-known...