Life

Emlyn was the second son of Thomas Emlyn

Thomas Emlyn

Thomas Emlyn , English nonconformist divine.-Life:Emlyn was born at Stamford, Lincolnshire and served as chaplain to the presbyterian Letitia, countess of Donegal, and then to Sir Robert Rich, afterwards becoming colleague to Joseph Boyse, presbyterian minister in Dublin...

. He was born at Dublin, where his father was at the time settled, on 27 December 1697. He studied law, entered as a student at Leiden University

Leiden University

Leiden University , located in the city of Leiden, is the oldest university in the Netherlands. The university was founded in 1575 by William, Prince of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt in the Eighty Years' War. The royal Dutch House of Orange-Nassau and Leiden University still have a close...

 17 Sept. 1714, became a member of Lincoln's Inn

Lincoln's Inn

The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are called to the Bar. The other three are Middle Temple, Inner Temple and Gray's Inn. Although Lincoln's Inn is able to trace its official records beyond...

, and rose to be of great reputation as a chamber counsel. Emlyn was anxious for reforms of the law, and very forcibly pointed out the defects in the system as then practised. He remarked in 1730 on the ‘tediousness and delays’ of civil suits, ‘the exorbitant fees to counsel, whereto the costs recovered bear no proportion,’ the overgreat ‘nicety of special pleadings,’ the scandal of the ecclesiastical courts. In criminal law he objected to the forced unanimity of the jury, the Latin record of the proceedings, the refusal of counsel to those charged with felony, the practice of pressing to death obstinately mute prisoners, capital punishment for trifling offences, ‘the oppressions and extortions of gaolers,’ and generally the bad management of gaols.

Emlyn died 28 June 1754. He was interred in Bunhill Fields

Bunhill Fields

Bunhill Fields is a cemetery in the London Borough of Islington, north of the City of London, and managed by the City of London Corporation. It is about 4 hectares in extent, although historically was much larger....

 burying-ground, where there is an inscription to his memory. He married on 10 November 1729 Mary, daughter of Rev. William Woodhouse, by whom he had two sons: Thomas, a chancery barrister, who died in 1796; and Sollom (d. 1744).

Works

• (ed.) Sir Matthew Hale's History of the Pleas of the Crown, 1736.
• Queries relating to Elizabeth Canning
  Elizabeth Canning
  Elizabeth Canning was an English maidservant who claimed to have been kidnapped and held against her will in a hayloft for almost a month...
  
  's Case, with Answers, 1754.
• (ed.) State Trials, 2nd ed., printed with a preface in six volumes folio in 1730
• (ed.) Works of Thomas Evelyn, with a prefatory biography (4th ed. 3 vols. 1746).