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Indiana University Studies 
law so far as it was received into the English Ecclesiastical 
Courts in probate and divorce causes, international law so far 
as made a part of our municipal law, and English statutes 
prior to the Revolution so far as applicable to conditions in 
America. 
2. Equity. Equity is that body of law developed by the 
Courts of Equity (or Chancery) in England and the United 
States. The Court of Chancery developed in England, out of 
the residuary power of the king to do justice which had been 
delegated to the common law courts, for the purpose of cor- 
recting the formal character of the rules of the common law 
as to property in land, the rigidity of its system of writs and 
actions, the defect that it could not command, the defect that 
it must have one party on each side and only two sides, the 
defect that its jurisdiction was contentious and not preven- 
tive, and the defect that it had no power to make a conditional 
judgment. The chancellors did not confine themselves to any 
special field, but corrected abuses both in substantive law and 
procedure wherever they found them. They found the great- 
est abuse in the substantive law of remedies and corrected 
this. Hence they made equity essentially a law of remedies. 
Their principal contributions to substantive law are the doc- 
trines of trusts and equitable servitudes in property, specific 
performance, reformation, rescission, accounting and assign- 
ment in contracts, equitable waste and prevention of torts 
in torts, redemption in mortgages, and constructive trusts in 
quasi-contracts ; and their principal contributions to legal pro- 
cedure are rules as to joinder of parties and actions, deposi- 
tions, proceedings in personam , subpoena of witnesses, inter- 
pleader, discovery, enforcement of decrees, contempt, and 
methods of taking an account, etc. 
3. Law Merchant. The law merchant is that body of law 
developed by the merchants in their own local courts. The 
merchants of western Europe at one time had a body of com- 
mercial usage of their own. The ordinary law was not ap- 
plied between merchant and merchant. They were in a class 
by themselves, and were governed by the law applied by their 
own special tribunals. But largely thru the influence of Lord 
Mansfield the common law courts gradually supplanted these 
merchants’ courts by summoning juries of merchants to in- 
