This chapter maps the continued presence of Roman Catholics at the inns of court, from the accession of Elizabeth and her protestant church settlement of 1559 to the eve of the civil war. ‘Survival and Resurgence’ shows that besides a significant remnant of Catholic lawyerswho had held firm to their traditional beliefs and successfully resisted conformity to the new dispensation, the 1570s saw the arrival of missionary priests charged with reviving the old faith. Besides supporting existing Catholics, they sought new adherents among the gentlemen students of the inns of court, as a vital step towards freeing the country from heresy.

Notwithstanding a battery of increasingly restrictive measures aimed at excluding Catholics from the inns, ‘Quietism and Survival’ shows that papists continued to be admitted and even promoted to the bar and bench. But the anticipated flood of well-born converts did not eventuate, and in the early seventeenth century the failure of Gunpowder Plot saw a more relaxed and tolerant attitude towards Catholics, at the inns as elsewhere, on the part of both government and the inns’ rulers. While both pragmatic and commendably tolerant, this policy stance underestimated the political potency of anti-popish paranoia among the population at large.

‘The Clerical Establishment’ of the inns of court ranged from lowly chaplains who conducted daily services to well-paid pulpit orators appointed as ‘lecturers’ or preachers to deliver regular sermons in the Temple Church and chapels of Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn. The advent of the preacherships and the prominent presbyteriansamong those divineswho first held these positions has been regarded as signalling the strength of puritan zeal at the inns. But ‘The Elizabethan Experiment’ argues that both were actively encouraged by government as an anti-Catholic measure, rather than simply reflecting the benchers’ own religious preferences.

‘Moderates and Radicals’ shows that while most inns’ preachers from 1600 to 1640 were radical protestants, such zealots did not monopolise their pulpits. ‘The Puritan Lay Presence’considers in more detail the religious attitudes of the inns’ lawyer members. While Lincoln’s Inn was the godly brethren’s stronghold, all four houses served as recruiting grounds and points of contact for those committed to further reformation of church and commonwealth. But if a combination of ideological and material forces tended to attract common lawyers to the godly camp, there were always lawyers anxious to support the established church and to reject its more extreme puritan critics.

As voluntary unincorporated societies, the inns hardly existed apart from their members. This chapter opens with a discussion (‘Motives and Status’) of reasons for the boom in admissions to membership from the mid-sixteenth century and the unsuccessful efforts to regulate and restrict that expansion. The following section (‘Income and Social Origins’) considers economic barriers to membership and the familial origins of those so admitted during the half-century before the Long Parliament, concluding that the inns’ students were generally recruited from a considerably higher social stratum than the student population of the two ancient universities. The chapter moves on to examine the ‘Regional Origins’ of inns of court entrants, showing that while they came from all over England, Wales and Ireland, each society had a distinctive regional recruitment pattern. At the same time, attendance at the inns did much to strengthen the national identity of the future governing elite, rather than merely reinforcing local divisions. A final section (‘Social Tensions and the Exodus of the Gentry’) points to tensions between young gentlemen students and the inns’ lawyer members, contributing to the gradual abandonment of the inns as finishing schools for the upper ranks of society after the civil wars.

Digitalization and the development of automated systems, as well as the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), have radically changed the legal landscape and will continue to impact law at an accelerated pace. These developments have led to the creation of a new industry, legal tech (LT), which aims at creating technological applications specifically tailored for law and the legal market. LT includes a broad range of applications: some of the most prominent and recurrent examples include automation in the drafting of contracts, “mining” case-law, or the creation of smart dispute resolution systems not requiring human intervention. As a result, operations that were previously unthinkable, or that would demand an enormous amount of human resources, can now be readily done through numerous legal services available to lawyers, other professionals, and consumers.1 The rise of LT has brought about various responses, from those who advocate the innovating potential of LT2 to legal traditionalists that consider the replacement of human resources by technology to be highly disruptive.3 In addition, there are those who advocate for a level-headed distinction between “hype” and reality.4 Nonetheless, it would be shortsighted not to see that the advancement of LT is going to have a profound impact on the legal sector, in a degree similar to that which industrialization had on manufacturing.