This study examines two interconnected and as yet wholly neglected aspects of Max Weber's 'Sociology of Law,' namely, its substantive underpinnings and focal concern with the status of the judge. At the heart of the 'Sociology of Law' is a comparative analysis of the Continental and the English administrations of justice, which can best be understood when read against his substantive sociology and which requires an assiduous reading of the 'Sociology of Law.' Thus the first part of this examination elucidates Weber's overarching concern with the effects of bureaucratization on the development of personality. The second part provides a detailed explication of the 'Sociology of Law' which privileges his treatment of the Common Law and distinguishes the juristic and sociological strands of his analysis, re-examines his notion of formal and substantive rationality, pays close attention to his assessment of the Free Law Movement, and accords due place to his discussion of the anti-formalistic tendencies in modern law. Taken together, these expose the contradictions and assumptions which frame his tendentious analysis and bring to light the vital role he ascribes to the judge.

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This thesis seeks to place drama of the Caroline commercial theatre in its contemporary political and legal context; particularly, it addresses the ways in which the struggle for supremacy between the royal prerogative, common law and local custom is constructed and negotiated in plays of the period. It argues that as the reign of Charles I progresses, the divine right and absolute power of the monarchy on stage begins to lose its authority, as playwrights, particularly Massinger and Brome, present a decline from divinity into the presentation of an arbitrary man who seeks to impose and increase his authority by enforcing obedience to selfish and wilful actions and demands. This decline from divinity, I argue, allows for the rise of a competing legitimate legal authority in the form of common law. Engaging with the contemporary discourse of custom, reason and law which pervades legal tracts of the period such as Coke’s Institutes and Reports and Davies’ ‘Preface Dedicatory’ to Le Primer Report des Cases & Matters en Ley resolues & adiudges en les Courts del Roy en Ireland, drama by Brome, Jonson, Massinger and Shirley presents arbitrary absolutism as madness, and adherence to customary common law as reason which restores order. In this climate, the drama suggests, royal manipulation of the law for personal ends, of which Charles I was often accused, destabilises law and legal authority. This destabilisation of legal authority is examined in a broader context in plays set in areas outwith London, geographically distant from central authority. The thesis places these plays in the context of Charles I’s attempts to centralise local law enforcement through such publications as the Book of Orders. When maintaining order in the provinces came into conflict with central legislation, the local officials exercised what Keith Wrightson describes as ‘two concepts of order’, turning a blind eye to certain activities when strict enforcement of law would create rather than dissolve local tensions. In both attempting to insist on unity between the centre and the provinces through tighter control of local officials, and dividing the centre from the provinces in the dissolution of Parliament, Charles’s government was, the plays suggest, in danger not only of destabilising and decentralising legal authority but of fragmenting it. This thesis argues that drama provides a medium whereby the politico-legal debates of the period may be presented to, and debated by, a wider audience than the more technical contemporary legal arguments, and, during Charles I’s personal rule, the theatre became a public forum for debate when Parliament was unavailable.