Historical and Ancient Courts

Historical and Ancient Courts gathers the trial courts of this subcategory that no longer sit in their original form: medieval England's Exchequer of Pleas and Court of King's Bench, ancient Rome's Centumviral court, Classical Athens' Dikasterion, the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem's High Court, Egypt's Mixed Courts that operated under extraterritorial jurisdiction until 1949, the Spanish Netherlands' 1567 Council of Troubles, Albania's 1945 Special Court, communist-era Czechoslovakia's Executive Court of Presov, the English Prerogative court, and a wartime resistance Underground court. Spanning from Classical antiquity through the twentieth century, these courts illustrate how court systems have changed shape across history even as the underlying function, first-instance adjudication, has stayed constant.