The Common Law Foundations of Item 95

Thirty-Three Cases, Seven Rights, One Tradition

Prepared for the Restore constitutional programme, 12 July 2026

Purpose and Method

Item 95 of the Common Law Constitution declares that the rights it preserves — lawful speech and expression, peaceful assembly, privacy of home, person, papers, and effects, the enjoyment of property, and the quiet enjoyment of lawful life, work, home, family, conscience, and association — “are not enumerated rights but have arisen out of common law judgements.” This paper makes that claim good, right by right, with thirty-three cases decided by English and Irish courts between 1602 and 1898.

Every case below was decided before 1900, and before the modern statutory codes — the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, the Trade Union Acts, the Libel Act 1792 and its successors — displaced or overlaid the older case law. None depends for its authority on an Act of Parliament; each is a judge's or a jury's resolution of a dispute between named parties, out of which a principle of general application was afterwards read. Six cases are given for each of the four rights named first in Item 95 (speech, assembly, privacy, property); the three strands gathered under “quiet enjoyment” — lawful life, work and association, and home, family, and conscience — are given three cases each, reflecting their narrower and more specific scope.

A caution proper to any exercise of this kind: the common law rarely states a right in the abstract. It resolves a dispute, and a right is what later lawyers and historians read out of the accumulated resolutions. Several of the cases below (Purcell v Sowler, O'Kelly v Harvey, R v Hunt, R v Jackson) show the law finding the edge of a right, or correcting an older rule, rather than declaring the right from the outset. That gradual, case-by-case arrival at a settled position is itself the common law method Item 95 describes, and this paper has not tidied it away.

A. Lawful Speech and Expression¶

The freedom to publish, to report, and to criticise without being silenced by the threat of a directed conviction. Built case by case from a jury's refusal to convict a churchman for republishing a pamphlet, through the press's right to report Parliament and comment on public affairs, to the modern test for honest criticism.

R v Shipley (Dean of St Asaph's Case) (1784) 4 Doug KB 73; 21 St Tr 847

William Davies Shipley, Dean of St Asaph, was prosecuted for seditious libel after republishing a reformist pamphlet. Under the law as it then stood, the jury's role was limited to finding whether he had published the document; whether its contents were criminally libellous was for the judge alone to decide. Defending Shipley, Thomas Erskine argued the jury was entitled to decide the whole question, guilt included. The jury returned an ambiguous verdict of “guilty of publishing only,” which the court read as a conviction, but Lord Mansfield later found no part of the publication criminal and discharged Shipley. Erskine's argument became the basis of the Libel Act 1792, but the right he asserted — that no citizen's words could be condemned as criminal without a jury's judgment on their content — was established in this courtroom before Parliament ever legislated it.

Stockdale v Hansard (1839) 9 Ad & E 1; 112 ER 1112

A bookseller sued the parliamentary printer for libel over a report, ordered to be published by the House of Commons, that had described one of his publications as obscene. The Commons claimed an absolute privilege to authorise publication of anything it pleased, immune from the courts. The Court of Queen's Bench held otherwise: a resolution of one House of Parliament could not itself alter the law of the land or place its printer beyond the reach of an ordinary citizen's action for defamation; only the Crown in Parliament — Lords, Commons, and Monarch together — could do that. The case established, against Parliament's own claim to the contrary, that the freedom to publish is bounded by law which the ordinary courts, not the legislature alone, are entitled to determine.

Campbell v Spottiswoode (1863) 3 B & S 769; 122 ER 288

A newspaper had accused the promoter of a missionary fund-raising scheme of using it as a pretext to boost the sales of his own paper, and suggested his published subscription lists were fabricated. Sued for libel, the newspaper pleaded fair comment. The court held that discussion of a subject genuinely before the public is protected, but the protection covers comment on conduct honestly criticised, not imputations of dishonest motive advanced without any factual foundation. Crompton J's statement that “it is the right of all the Queen's subjects to discuss public matters” is among the clearest common law recognitions that criticism of public conduct is a protected freedom, while marking the line between comment and unfounded accusation that later cases would refine.

Wason v Walter (1868) LR 4 QB 73

The Times had published a full report of a House of Lords debate in which a peer was accused, in Parliament, of acting dishonourably; the peer sued the newspaper for repeating the accusation. The Court of Queen's Bench held that a fair and accurate report of parliamentary proceedings, published in good faith and without a garbled or partial account, is protected by qualified privilege — not because Parliament said so, but because the same principle that protects fair reports of court proceedings applies equally to the proceedings of the nation's legislature. The judgment placed the public's right to know what is said in Parliament on an independent common law footing, distinct from and older than any statutory privilege later enacted for the same purpose.

Purcell v Sowler (1877) 2 CPD 215

A Manchester newspaper reported a public meeting of Poor Law guardians at which a doctor was accused, in his absence, of neglecting sick patients; the doctor sued when the report was republished without his ever having had a chance to answer the charge. The Court of Appeal held the report was not privileged: although the administration of the Poor Law was undoubtedly a matter of public concern, there was no public duty to circulate an accusation against a named individual who had no opportunity to meet it. The case marks the edge of the common law's protection of the press — it did not extend to unanswered accusations against private reputations — and the gap it exposed was closed, a few years later, by the Newspaper Libel and Registration Act 1881.

Merivale v Carson (1887) 20 QBD 275

A theatre critic's review accused a play of borrowing its plot from a scandalous divorce case; the playwrights sued for libel. The Court of Appeal held the review was protected as fair comment, and Lord Esher formulated the test that has governed the defence ever since: would any fair-minded person, however exaggerated or prejudiced, have been capable of writing what was written? The case confirmed that fair comment protects genuine, if harsh, criticism of any work or conduct placed before the public — not only comment on public figures or political questions — provided the comment is honestly held and does not travel beyond the facts. It completed, a century after Shipley, the common law's construction of a free press: publish, report fairly, and criticise honestly, and the law will protect you.

B. Peaceful Assembly¶

The freedom to gather and process peaceably without being treated as automatically criminal — bounded, but not abolished, by the risk that others may respond with violence.

Trial of Penn and Mead / Bushell's Case (1670) Vaughan 135; 124 ER 1006

William Penn and William Mead were prosecuted for preaching to a Quaker meeting in the street after the doors of their usual meeting-house were shut against them by the authorities, charged with unlawful assembly. The jury refused the judge's direction to convict, returning a verdict that Penn was guilty only “of speaking in Gracechurch Street” — in effect, acquitting him of the charge of unlawful assembly itself. The judge fined and imprisoned the jurors for their verdict; the foreman, Edward Bushell, secured his release by habeas corpus, and Chief Justice Vaughan ruled that a jury could never be punished merely for the verdict it returned. The case did two things at once: it protected a peaceable religious assembly from being treated as automatically criminal, and it guaranteed that no jury could ever again be coerced into convicting one.

R v Hunt (1820) 1 St Tr NS 171; 3 B & Ald 566

Henry Hunt and eight others were tried for seditious conspiracy and unlawful assembly after addressing a mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester — the meeting dispersed by cavalry in the episode remembered as Peterloo. Hunt was convicted, but the trial itself turned on defining what makes an assembly unlawful: not its size, its purpose, or the alarm it causes to onlookers, but whether it is conducted, or intended, with force and violence, or gives just ground for expecting a breach of the peace. By fixing the test at violence or its reasonable apprehension, rather than at mere numbers or unpopular opinion, the case — even in convicting Hunt — supplied the legal boundary that peaceable mass meetings for political reform would rely on for the rest of the century.

Humphries v Connor (1864) 17 ICLR 1

A police officer removed an orange lily — a sectarian emblem — from a woman walking peaceably along a public street in County Cavan, fearing her wearing it would provoke an attack by others. Sued for the trespass, the officer argued necessity. The Irish Court of Common Pleas accepted that a constable's paramount duty is to preserve the peace and, faced with an imminent breach of it, may act to prevent disorder — but only where the danger is real and immediate, not merely conceivable. The case is one of the earliest to test the proposition, later central to Beatty v Gillbanks, that a person going peaceably about lawful business may not simply be silenced or interfered with because others might react to them with violence; the officer's justification had to meet a genuine, pressing necessity.

Beatty v Gillbanks (1882) 9 QBD 308

The Salvation Army's Sunday processions through Weston-super-Mare had repeatedly provoked violent opposition from a rival “Skeleton Army,” and magistrates banned any further assembly to prevent a recurrence. When the Salvation Army marched again, its leaders were convicted of unlawful assembly. The Queen's Bench Division quashed the conviction: the marchers had done nothing violent or unlawful themselves, and a person may not be punished, nor a lawful assembly banned, on the ground that it may provoke unlawful violence by others. To hold otherwise, the court said, would be to convict a man of a crime because another man threatens to commit one against him. The case is the clearest common law statement that the right to assemble peaceably does not depend on the goodwill of those who oppose it.

O'Kelly v Harvey (1883) 14 LR Ir 105

A magistrate personally dispersed a large public meeting in Ireland, convened by the Land League, in the face of a hostile crowd he reasonably believed was about to attack it. Sued for assault and false imprisonment by those he had removed, the magistrate succeeded: the Irish Court of Appeal held that where a magistrate reasonably and honestly believes a breach of the peace by others is truly imminent, and no lesser measure will prevent it, he may act to disperse even a meeting that is itself entirely lawful. Decided a year after Beatty v Gillbanks, the case supplies the necessary counterweight to it — confirming that the right of assembly, real as it is, yields to a genuine and immediate necessity to prevent violence, and does not entitle organisers to insist on continuing at the cost of others' safety.

Ex parte Lewis (1888) 21 QBD 191

Members of the public claimed a right to hold meetings in Trafalgar Square, then as now under the control of the Commissioner of Works, and challenged his power to prohibit them. The Queen's Bench Division held there was no such right: the only public right recognised over a highway or square at common law is a right of passage — to pass and repass — and a claim to occupy the same ground indefinitely for a meeting was, in its nature, inconsistent with that right and with the equal rights of everyone else to use it. The case fixed an outer boundary on the common law right of assembly: it protects people meeting peaceably, but it does not convert every public space into a permanent forum, and does not override the management of land vested by law in someone else.

C. Privacy of Home, Person, Papers, and Effects¶

The principle that a citizen's home, body, and possessions are closed to the state except on lawful, particular authority — built almost entirely out of the eighteenth century's revolt against the general warrant, and extended into the nineteenth century's new administrative bodies.

Semayne's Case (1604) 5 Co Rep 91a; 77 ER 194

A landlord sought to enter a house to distrain for unpaid rent and to execute a legal process against a co-occupier, and the question was when an officer of the law may lawfully break open a person's door to get in. Sir Edward Coke's report gave the answer its most famous expression: “the house of every one is to him as his castle and fortress” — a place where the law itself protects a person against violence and injury, and even the King's own officers must first demand admittance and state their business before they may break in. The case did not deny the state any power of entry, but it made that power conditional on notice and lawful cause, planting, at the start of the seventeenth century, the principle that a person's home is not open to entry as of right.

Wilkes v Wood (1763) Lofft 1; 98 ER 489

Acting on a “general warrant” that named no individual, the King's messengers ransacked the home of John Wilkes, MP, searching for evidence connecting him to an anonymous, allegedly seditious pamphlet, and seized his private papers. Wilkes sued the officer who directed the search. Chief Justice Pratt (later Lord Camden) told the jury that if such a power truly existed, it would be “totally subversive of the liberty of the subject” and would place the person and property of every citizen at the mercy of a Secretary of State's discretion; the jury awarded Wilkes £1,000. The verdict, and others like it that followed the same term, destroyed the general warrant as a tool of state search and put beyond doubt that entering a home and seizing papers requires lawful, particular authority.

Huckle v Money (1763) 2 Wils KB 205; 95 ER 768

A young journeyman printer, uninvolved in publishing the pamphlet the government was hunting for, was arrested at his home under the same general warrant used against Wilkes, held for six hours, and treated well enough while detained. He sued for false imprisonment, and the defence argued his damages should be nominal since he had suffered no real harm. The court disagreed, and the jury awarded £300 — a sum plainly far beyond compensation for a comfortable few hours' detention. The judges upheld it: where a magistrate exercises an arbitrary power in violation of a subject's basic liberty, the law will award exemplary damages to mark the wrong, whatever the actual injury. The case established that unlawful intrusion into a person's liberty is punished as a wrong in itself, not merely compensated as an inconvenience.

Leach v Money (1765) 19 St Tr 1001; 97 ER 1075

A printer, arrested and searched under the same general warrant that had been used against Wilkes and Huckle, sued the King's messengers who had broken into his house. Lord Mansfield, delivering the judgment of the full Court of King's Bench, held the warrant void on its face: it authorised the arrest of unnamed persons on the messengers' own say-so, and no principle of law — not even the authority of a Secretary of State — could support a warrant that left it to the officer executing it to decide whom to arrest. Coming from Mansfield, no friend to Wilkes personally, the ruling confirmed that the illegality of general warrants was now settled law rather than the verdict of a sympathetic jury, closing off any prospect that a differently composed court might later revive them.

Entick v Carrington (1765) 19 St Tr 1029; 95 ER 807

The King's Chief Messenger and three others broke into the home of the writer John Entick under a general warrant, spent four hours searching every room, and carried off a hundred of his books and pamphlets. Entick sued for trespass. Lord Camden's judgment held that the King's ministers could point to no law, statute, or judicial precedent authorising what they had done, and that in England executive power is not self-justifying: “If it is law, it will be found in our books. If it is not to be found there, it is not law.” Government officers, like any other person, must show lawful authority for entering land or seizing goods, or answer for it as trespassers. The case remains the single most-cited common law statement that the state has no power over a citizen's home or papers beyond what the law expressly gives it.

Cooper v Wandsworth Board of Works (1863) 14 CB (NS) 180

A local board, empowered to demolish buildings erected without the required notice, tore down a house that Cooper had part-built without giving him any opportunity to explain the omission or be heard before the demolition. Cooper sued for the damage. The Court of Common Pleas held that a power to destroy a person's property, however plainly granted, carries with it an implied duty to hear the person affected before it is exercised — a principle, Willes J said, “of universal application” wherever a tribunal or body is empowered to affect a subject's property. The case extended the protection of home and property from the King's messengers of the eighteenth century to the new administrative bodies of the nineteenth: no official, however lawfully empowered in general terms, may take a person's home without first hearing them.

D. The Right to Hold and Enjoy Property Unencumbered¶

The principle that a person's trade, land, and goods may not be taken, restrained, or diverted except by law made and applied through Parliament and the courts — never by the unilateral will of the Crown or of anyone holding property on another's behalf.

Darcy v Allein (The Case of Monopolies) (1602) 11 Co Rep 84b; 77 ER 1260

The Crown had granted a courtier the exclusive right to make and sell all playing cards in England; when a rival trader ignored the monopoly, the grant-holder sued him for infringement. The Court of King's Bench held the grant void: a monopoly restraining others from exercising a trade they were previously free to follow was contrary to the common law, because it raised prices, lowered quality, and — critically — deprived tradesmen of their livelihood without their consent, for no public benefit. The case established, at the very start of the seventeenth century, that a person's property in their own trade and skill could not be taken from them by the mere exercise of royal favour, and that the common law, not the royal prerogative, was the guardian of that property.

The Case of Proclamations (1610) 12 Co Rep 74; 77 ER 1352

King James I asked the judges, in advance, whether he could prohibit new buildings in London and the manufacture of starch from wheat simply by royal proclamation, without an Act of Parliament. Sir Edward Coke and his fellow judges advised that he could not: the King “by his proclamation cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm,” and has no power to create a new offence unknown to the law merely by declaring it one. The ruling meant that a subject's property and trade could be restricted only by law made through Parliament and the courts, never by executive decree alone — a principle that put a permanent limit on the Crown's capacity to encumber property by its own authority.

Dr Bonham's Case (1610) 8 Co Rep 107a; 77 ER 638

The Royal College of Physicians, acting under its own charter, fined and imprisoned Dr Thomas Bonham for practising medicine in London without its licence — and took half of any fine for itself, judging its own cause. Bonham sued for false imprisonment. Coke CJ held that a body cannot be both judge and beneficiary in the same dispute, and went further: where an Act of Parliament is “against common right or reason,” the common law will control it and may adjudge it void. However narrowly later courts confined that second proposition, the case's practical holding endured — that no person's liberty or livelihood may be taken away by a tribunal financially interested in the outcome, a safeguard as relevant to the taking of property as to imprisonment.

The Case of Ship-Money (R v Hampden) (1637) 3 St Tr 825

Charles I levied “ship money,” a tax historically confined to coastal towns in wartime for naval defence, on the entire country in peacetime, without Parliament's consent. John Hampden refused to pay a sum of twenty shillings and was sued for it. A bare majority of the judges found for the Crown, holding the King could judge for himself when the realm was in danger and levy the tax accordingly — but four of the twelve judges dissented, ruling that no subject's property could be taken without common consent given through Parliament. The judgment was reversed by statute within four years, and it was the dissenting judges, not the majority, whom later generations honoured as having stated the true common law: that the King cannot take a subject's property by his own unilateral judgment of necessity.

Armory v Delamirie (1722) 1 Str 505; 93 ER 664

A chimney sweep's boy found a jewel and took it to a goldsmith's shop to have it valued; the goldsmith's apprentice removed the stones under pretence of weighing them and returned only the empty setting, offering a token sum for it. The boy sued for the value of the jewel. The court held that a finder, though not the true owner, has a property in the object good against everyone except the rightful owner, and awarded damages assessed on the assumption the stones were of the finest quality, since the goldsmith who had wrongfully taken them could hardly complain of an estimate he had made impossible to verify. The case established that mere possession, honestly come by, is itself a property right the law will protect — even a boy with no title beyond the finding.

Keech v Sandford (1726) Sel Cas King 61; 25 ER 223

A trustee held a lease of a market on behalf of an infant beneficiary; when the landlord refused to renew the lease in the child's name but offered to grant it to the trustee personally, the trustee took it for himself. The Court of Chancery ordered him to hold the new lease on trust for the child and account for its profits, even though the trustee had acted in good faith and the child could never in fact have obtained the renewal himself. Lord King LC held the rule had to be kept strict, or trustees would always find some plausible reason to keep property for themselves. The case fixed, at the level of principle, that property held for another may never be diverted to the advantage of the person holding it — the foundation of equity's protection of beneficial ownership ever since.

E. Quiet Enjoyment of Lawful Life¶

Personal security and bodily integrity — the right not to be touched, struck, or menaced without lawful cause. Established through the law of trespass to the person (assault and battery), centuries before any statutory offence against the person existed.

Tuberville v Savage (1669) 1 Mod Rep 3; 86 ER 684

Tuberville put his hand on his sword and said, “If it were not assize-time, I would not take such language from you.” Savage struck first and put out his eye; when sued, Savage argued Tuberville's gesture was itself an assault that justified his response. The court held that words can negate what would otherwise be a threatening act — because the condition (“if it were not assize-time”) showed no intention of immediate violence, there was no assault. The case fixed the test still used today: liability turns on whether the defendant's conduct would put a reasonable person in fear of imminent, unlawful force. It is the founding case establishing that the law protects a person's peace of mind and physical security as such, independent of any contact having occurred.

Cole v Turner (1704) 6 Mod Rep 149; 87 ER 907

Arising from a dispute over passage on a narrow road, Chief Justice Holt laid down the governing principle of battery in three propositions: that the least touching of another in anger is a battery; that if two meet in a narrow passage and one gently lays a hand on the other to pass, that is no battery; but that any violence, however small, done in an angry, revengeful, rude, or insolent manner is. The case established that the law protects bodily integrity from any unwanted contact carrying hostile intent, however trivial the force — the touch itself, not the injury it causes, is the wrong. This remains the black-letter definition of battery in English law.

Stephens v Myers (1830) 4 C & P 349; 172 ER 735

At a parish meeting, Myers advanced on the chairman with a clenched fist, declaring he would rather pull him out of his chair than be turned out of the room himself, and was stopped only by a third party's intervention before he reached him. He argued no assault had occurred because he never got close enough to strike. The court disagreed: it is enough that the defendant has begun to carry out a threat and has the apparent present ability to complete it — the victim need not wait to be struck before the law intervenes. This extended the personal-security principle from Tuberville to cover an advancing threat, confirming that the right protected is safety from apprehended violence, not merely freedom from completed injury.

F. Quiet Enjoyment of Work and Free Association¶

The freedom to pursue a lawful trade, to combine with others in that pursuit, and to compete or bargain collectively without being treated as a conspirator. Unlike the other categories in this paper, this right emerged unevenly — courts were hostile to combinations well into the nineteenth century — and reached its clearest common law statement only in the 1890s, in the years just before Parliament began legislating trade union law directly.

Mogul Steamship Co Ltd v McGregor, Gow & Co (1892) AC 25

A group of shipowners combined to control the China tea trade, offering rebates to agents who dealt with them exclusively and driving a rival, Mogul Steamship, out of the conference. Mogul sued in conspiracy. The House of Lords held that competitors may lawfully combine to protect and extend their trade, and may use any lawful means — including price-cutting and exclusive dealing — even where the deliberate object is to injure a rival's business, provided no unlawful act or means is employed. The judgment is the foundation of the common law freedom to combine for trade purposes: self-interested combination is not, by itself, an actionable conspiracy.

Nordenfelt v Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Co Ltd [1894] AC 535

An armaments manufacturer sold his business and covenanted not to compete anywhere in the world for twenty-five years. The House of Lords held such a covenant is prima facie void as a restraint of trade — the starting presumption of English law is that every person is free to exercise their trade and skill wherever and however they choose — but that the presumption can be displaced where the restraint is reasonable, in this case because the price paid reflected the whole value of a genuinely worldwide business. The case supplies the other half of the common law's protection of livelihood: any contract restricting a person's freedom to work is unenforceable unless justified as reasonable, with the burden on the party seeking to enforce it.

Allen v Flood [1898] AC 1

A trade union representative told shipwrights' employers that if two shipwrights who had done joiners' work were not dismissed, the boilermakers he represented would walk out. The employers dismissed the men, who sued the union official. The House of Lords held, by a majority of six to three, that a lawful act — here, truthfully stating that a strike would follow — does not become actionable merely because it is done with the intention of harming another and does succeed in harming him; liability requires either an independently unlawful act or the use of unlawful means such as threats of violence or breach of contract. The case is the clearest common law statement that workers and their representatives may act collectively in their own economic interest, and that harm to an employer or rival worker, without more, gives no cause of action.

G. Quiet Enjoyment of Home, Family, and Conscience¶

Three distinct strands drawn together under one head: freedom to hold and act on religious or moral conviction without being compelled to violate it; the personal liberty of family members against domestic confinement; and the settled occupier's right to enjoy a home undisturbed by a neighbour's interference. (State intrusion into the home itself — warrants, forced entry, seizure of papers — falls under the separate privacy limb of Item 95 and is addressed in Section C above.)

The Trial of the Seven Bishops (1688) 12 State Trials 183

King James II ordered his Declaration of Indulgence to be read from every pulpit in the Church of England. Archbishop Sancroft and six bishops petitioned to be excused, believing the Declaration rested on an illegal claim of royal power to suspend Acts of Parliament; the King had them prosecuted for seditious libel. Directed by the judges to convict, the jury acquitted all seven. The verdict established, as a matter of practical constitutional law, that a jury could not be compelled to convict a defendant for acting on conscientious religious objection to an unlawful royal command, and that the right to petition the Crown for redress of grievance was not itself a crime. The acquittal was treated within months as vindicated by the Bill of Rights 1689, but the right was established by the jury's verdict, not the later Act.

R v Jackson [1891] 1 QB 671

Emily Jackson left her husband; he seized her in the street on her way from church and confined her in his house to compel her to resume living with him, asserting a husband's common law right to restrain his wife's person until she consented. On an application for habeas corpus, the Court of Appeal held that no such right existed: a husband has no legal authority to imprison or use force against his wife to compel restitution of conjugal rights, and habeas corpus lies to free her. The decision overturned an older line of authority (going back through cases such as R v Cochrane (1840)) that had tolerated “moderate” domestic confinement, and established for the first time that personal liberty within marriage is protected by the general common law of personal freedom — a family member's liberty does not dissolve into a spouse's custody.

Sturges v Bridgman (1879) 11 Ch D 852

A confectioner had ground his pestle and mortar against a party wall for over twenty years before a doctor built a consulting room on the other side; the doctor sued when the noise and vibration made the room unusable. The confectioner argued the doctor had “come to the nuisance” and so had no complaint. The Court of Appeal disagreed: what is reasonable use of one's own property is judged by the character of the neighbourhood and the effect on the neighbour's enjoyment of his land, not by which use came first. The case is the leading common law statement of the occupier's right to the quiet enjoyment of a home or workplace against a neighbour's interference — the doctrine of nuisance protecting settled domestic and working life, independent of any statute.

Appendix: Table of Cases¶

All thirty-three cases, grouped by right in the order presented above, with date and citation for quick reference.