Common law, equità e interpretazione degli statutes nel diritto inglese di età moderna

The historiography on the development of the concept of equity in English law has mainly been focused on the association of the jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery with Aristotelian epieikeia, a link that can be traced back to the publication of Christopher Saint German’s Doctor and Student. However, this interest in equity in general and in epieikeia in particular was part of an intellectual movement spread across Europe, where civil and canon lawyers referred to equity, from the sixteenth century onwards, as a doctrine of purposive interpretation beyond the letter of the law. A similar development of equity occurred in England, separately from its association with the Chancery: legal interpretation provided a suitable context for the conceptual development of equity, and several English legal authors aligned their writings with those of civil lawyers to borrow Aristotelian epieikeia as a new justification for the medieval doctrine of the «equity of the statute». This development of equity within the common law saw a steady decline from the seventeenth century onwards due to the growing popularity of its association with the Chancery, which eventually separated equity from its philosophical foundations, turning it into the legal term of art still in use among common lawyers.