Great cases are those judicial decisions around which the common law develops. This book explores eight exemplary cases from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia that show the law as a living, breathing, and down-the-street experience. It explores the social circumstances in which the cases arose and the ordinary people whose stories influenced and shaped the law as well as the characters and institutions (lawyers, judges, and courts) that did much of the heavy lifting. By examining the consequences and fallout of these decisions, the book depicts the common law as an experimental, dynamic, messy, productive, tantalizing, and bottom-up process, thereby revealing the diverse and uncoordinated attempts by the courts to adapt the law to changing conditions and shifting demands. Great cases are one way to glimpse the workings of the common law as an untidy, but stimulating exercise in human judgment and social accomplishment.

Drawing on politics, religion, law, literature, and philosophy, this interdisciplinary study is a sequel to Mark Fortier's bookThe Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2006). The earlier volume traced the meanings and usage of equity in broad cultural terms (including but not limited to law) to position equity as a keyword of valuation, persuasion, and understanding; the present volume carries that work through the Restoration and eighteenth century in Britain and America. Fortier argues that equity continued to be a keyword, used and contested in many of the major social and political events of the period. Further, he argues that equity needs to be seen in this period largely outside the Aristotelian parameters that have generally been assumed in scholarship on equity.

This monograph makes a major new contribution to the historiography of criminal justice in England and Wales by focusing on the intersection of the history of law and crime with medical history. It does this through the lens provided by one group of historical actors, medical professionals who gave evidence in criminal proceedings. They are the means of illuminating the developing methods and personnel associated with investigating and prosecuting crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when two linchpins of modern society, centralised policing and the adversarial criminal trial, emerged and matured. The book is devoted to two central questions: what did medical practitioners contribute to the investigation of serious violent crime in the period 1700 to 1914, and what impact did this have on the process of criminal justice? Drawing on the details of 2,600 cases of infanticide, murder and rape which occurred in central England, Wales and London, the book offers a comparative long-term perspective on medico-legal practice - that is, what doctors actually did when they were faced with a body that had become the object of a criminal investigation. It argues that medico-legal work developed in tandem with and was shaped by the needs of two evolving processes: pre-trial investigative procedures dominated successively by coroners, magistrates and the police; and criminal trials in which lawyers moved from the periphery to the centre of courtroom proceedings. In bringing together for the first time four groups of specialists - doctors, coroners, lawyers and police officers - this study offers a new interpretation of the processes that shaped the modern criminal justice system.

According to the US Constitution, if a bill is not returned to Congress by the president within ten days of receiving it and Congress has adjourned, the bill is effectively vetoed. The so-called pocket veto dates at least as far back as the presidency of James Madison (1808-1816), but the constitutionality of its use had not been considered by the Supreme Court until Okanogan et al. v. United States was decided in 1929, during the last year of Chief Justice Taft's tenure. Despite responding to a situation in American Indian law, the Pocket Veto Case is notable for the fact that its final decision had nothing whatsoever to do with Indian law. The Okanogan Tribe is barely mentioned at all in the Court's unanimous opinion, delivered by Justice Edward Sanford, which ultimately concluded that the pocket veto is a constitutional exercise of presidential authority. The Unusual Story of the Pocket Veto Case explores the underlying tension between congressional authority and the executive prerogative. Especially today, with such tension very much in evidence, it becomes all the more important to understand how and why the Constitution actually appears to encourage it. Studying Okanogan et al. v. United States and use of the pocket veto provides an excellent example of the tension between Congress and the president.

St. Augustine and Roman law are the two bridges from Athens and Jerusalem to the world of modern law. Augustine's almost eerily modern political realism was based upon his deep appreciation of human evil, arising from his insights into the human personality, the product of his reflections on his own life and the history of his times. These insights have traveled well through the ages and are mirrored in the pages of Aquinas, Luther and Calvin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt. The articles in this volume describe the life and world of Augustine and the ways in which he conceived both justice and law. They also discuss the little recognized Augustinian contributions to the field of modern hermeneutics - the discipline which informs the art of legal interpretation. Finally, they include Augustine's valuable discussion of church/state relations, the law of just wars, and proper role and limits of coercion, and the procreative dimensions of marriage. The volume also includes an extremely useful, definitive bibliography of Augustine and the law, and will leave readers with an increased appreciation of the contributions which Augustine has made to the history of jurisprudence. No one can read Augustine and these articles on his view of the law without taking away a new view of the law itself.

Frankfurt am Main, in common with other imperial German cities, enjoyed a large degree of legal autonomy during the early modern period, and produced a unique and rich body of criminal archives. In particular, Frankfurt's Strafenbuch, which records all criminal sentences between 1562 and 1696, provides a fascinating insight into contemporary penal trends. Drawing on this and other rich resources, Dr. Boes reveals shifting and fluid attitudes towards crime and punishment and how these were conditioned by issues of gender, class, and social standing within the city's establishment. She attributes a significant role in this process to the steady proliferation of municipal advocates, jurists trained in Roman Law, who wielded growing legal and penal prerogatives. Over the course of the book, it is demonstrated how the courts took an increasingly hard line with select groups of people accused of criminal behavior, and the open manner with which advocates exercised cultural, religious, racial, gender, and sexual-orientation repressions. Parallel with this, however, is identified a trend of marked leniency towards soldiers who enjoyed an increasingly privileged place within the judicial system. In light of this discrepancy between the treatment of civilians and soldiers, the advocates' actions highlight the emergence and spread of a distinct military judicial culture and Frankfurt's city council's contribution to the quasi-militarization of a civilian court. By highlighting the polarized and changing ways the courts dealt with civilian and military criminals, a fuller picture is presented not just of Frankfurt's sentencing and penal practices, but of broader attitudes within early modern Germany to issues of social position and cultural identity.

There exists a genuine degree of scepticism as to whether Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law can rationalise the intricacies of the English legal system. This groundbreaking book examines pertinent aspects of English law relating to constitutional patterns of law-making, the relationship between law and policy, and the ultimate efficacy of the legal order, through the pure theory's prism. This insightful book demonstrates that Kelsen's theory is highly suitable to examine some of these issues, and in some aspects of English law it actually possesses the analytical cutting edge. Beginning with an overview of the outlook and methodology of the pure theory of law and placing it within the broader focus of positive scholarship, Orakhelashvili moves on to offer a description of the relationship between methods of the legal theory and the workings of a legal system, along with assessments of the relationship between law and policy in legal theory and in judicial practice, and of criticisms of the pure theory. Thoughtful and perceptive, this book will be valuable reading for legal scholars, social scientists, judges, practicing lawyers, legal historians, political scientists, and law students.

The number one Irish Times bestseller. 'An original and textured history of one of the most controversial and misunderstood episodes of modern Irish history' Diarmaid Ferriter. The arms crisis of 1970 came about when two Irish cabinet ministers, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, alongside an army officer and other figures, were accused by Taoiseach Jack Lynch of smuggling arms to the IRA in Northern Ireland. The criminal prosecution that followed, the Arms Trial, was a cause celebre at the time; while it resulted in the acquittal of all the accused, the political crisis it generated was one of the major events of late twentieth-century Irish history. In the fifty years since, myth and controversy has surrounded the trial and its aftermath. Was the country really on the brink of a bloody civil war involving North and South? Did the two Ministers sacked by Lynch help generate the bloody campaign of the Provisional IRA - or were they set up by the Taoiseach as fall guys for an arms plot that was unofficially authorized but always deniable by Lynch? Was there, as is often claimed, a kind of coup in preparation that Lynch's prompt action foiled? A great deal of astonishing new evidence has been uncovered by Michael Heney in his research for this book, raising serious questions about Lynch and his relationship with future Taoiseach Charles Haughey. The book also contains the first comprehensive investigation into how the arms trial prosecution was mounted, and how the jury came to their verdict of acquittal. Heney's meticulous scholarship challenges much of the conventional wisdom about these sensational events. The Arms Crisis of 1970 is a major contribution to our understanding of a pivotal moment in postwar Irish history.

The New Deal is often said to represent a sea change in American constitutional history, overturning a century of precedent to permit an expanded federal government, increased regulation of the economy, and eroded property protections. John Compton offers a surprising revision of this familiar narrative, showing that nineteenth-century evangelical Protestants, not New Deal reformers, paved the way for the most important constitutional developments of the twentieth century.

Following the great religious revivals of the early 1800s, American evangelicals embarked on a crusade to eradicate immorality from national life by destroying the property that made it possible. Their cause represented a direct challenge to founding-era legal protections of sinful practices such as slavery, lottery gambling, and buying and selling liquor. Although evangelicals urged the judiciary to bend the rules of constitutional adjudication on behalf of moral reform, antebellum judges usually resisted their overtures. But after the Civil War, American jurists increasingly acquiesced in the destruction of property on moral grounds.

In the early twentieth century, Oliver Wendell Holmes and other critics of laissez-faire constitutionalism used the judiciary's acceptance of evangelical moral values to demonstrate that conceptions of property rights and federalism were fluid, socially constructed, and subject to modification by democratic majorities. The result was a progressive constitutional regime--rooted in evangelical Protestantism--that would hold sway for the rest of the twentieth century.

Spanning almost a century of penal policy and practice in England and Wales, this book is a study of the long arc of the rehabilitative ideal, beginning in 1895, the year of the Gladstone Committee on Prisons, and ending in 1970, when the policy of treating and training criminals was very much on the defensive. Drawing on a plethora of source material, such as the official papers of mandarins, ministers, and magistrates, measures of public opinion, prisoner memoirs, publications of penal reform groups and prison officers, the reports of Royal Commissions and Departmental Committees, political opinion in both Houses of Parliament and the research of the first cadre of criminologists, this book comprehensively examines a number of aspects of the British penal system, including judicial sentencing, law-making, and the administration of legal penalties. In doing so, Victor Bailey expertly weaves a complex and nuanced picture of punishment in twentieth-century England and Wales, one that incorporates the enduring influence of the death penalty, and will force historians to revise their interpretation of twentieth-century social and penal policy. This detailed and ground-breaking account of the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal will be essential reading for scholars and students of the history of crime and justice and historical criminology, as well as those interested in social and legal history.

Spanning almost a century of penal policy and practice in England and Wales, this book is a study of the long arc of the rehabilitative ideal, beginning in 1895, the year of the Gladstone Committee on Prisons, and ending in 1970, when the policy of treating and training criminals was very much on the defensive. Drawing on a plethora of source material, such as the official papers of mandarins, ministers, and magistrates, measures of public opinion, prisoner memoirs, publications of penal reform groups and prison officers, the reports of Royal Commissions and Departmental Committees, political opinion in both Houses of Parliament and the research of the first cadre of criminologists, this book comprehensively examines a number of aspects of the British penal system, including judicial sentencing, law-making, and the administration of legal penalties. In doing so, Victor Bailey expertly weaves a complex and nuanced picture of punishment in twentieth-century England and Wales, one that incorporates the enduring influence of the death penalty, and will force historians to revise their interpretation of twentieth-century social and penal policy. This detailed and ground-breaking account of the rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal will be essential reading for scholars and students of the history of crime and justice and historical criminology, as well as those interested in social and legal history.

Volume I of The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales frames what was known about crime and criminal justice in the 1960s, before describing the liberalising legislation of the decade. Commissioned by the Cabinet Office and using interviews, British Government records, and papers housed in private, and institutional collections, this is the first of a collaboratively written series of official histories that analyse the evolution of criminal justice between 1959 and 1997. It opens with an account of the inception of the series, before describing what was known about crime and criminal justice at the time. It then outlines the genesis of three key criminal justice Acts that not only redefined the relations between the State and citizen, but also shaped what some believed to be the spirit of the age: the abolition of capital punishment, and the reform of the laws on abortion, and homosexuality. The Acts were taken to be so contentious morally and politically that Governments of different stripes were hesitant about promoting them formally. The onus was instead passed to backbenchers, who were supported by interlocking groups of reformers, with a pooled knowledge about how to effectively organise a rhetoric that drew on the language of utilitarianism, and the clarity and authority of a Church of England. This came to play an increasingly consequential and largely unacknowledged part in resolving what were often confusing moral questions. This book will be of much interest to students of criminology and British history, politics and law.

This brand new edition, redesigned in hardback for 2019, is the perfect gift for lawyers, armchair detectives and true crime aficionados everywhere.

A rollicking collection of barely believable stories from five centuries of legal history - you'll be gripped by these tales of murder, intrigue, crime, punishment and the pursuit of justice. Meet the only dead parrot ever to give evidence in a court of law, the doctor with the worst bedside manner of all time, the murderess who collected money from her mummified victim for 21 years, and explore one of the most indigestible dilemmas - if you'd been shipwrecked 2,000 miles from home, would you have eaten Parker the cabin boy? The tales within these pages are bizarre, fascinating, hilarious and, most importantly, true.

Augustine posed two questions that go to the heart of the nature of law. Firstly, what is the difference between a kingdom and a band of robbers? Secondly, is an unjust law a law at all? These two questions force us to consider whether law is simply a means of social control, distinguished from a band of robbers only by its size, or whether law is a social institution justified by its orientation towards justice. The End of Law applies Augustine's questions to modern legal philosophy as well as offering a critical theory of natural law that draws on Augustine's ideas. McIlroy argues that such a critical natural law theory is realistic but not cynical about law's relationship to justice and to violence, can diagnose ways in which law becomes deformed and pathological, and indicates that law is a necessary but insufficient instrument for the pursuit of justice. Positioning an examination of Augustine's reflections on law in the context of his broader thought, McIlroy presents an alternative approach to natural law theory, drawing from critical theory, postmodern thought, and political theologies in conversation with Augustine. This insightful book will be fascinating reading for law students and legal philosophers seeking to understand the perspective and commitments of natural law theory and the significance of Augustine. Readers with an interest in interdisciplinary approaches to legal theory will also find this book a stimulating read.

By 1838, over two thousand Americans had been killed and many hundreds injured by exploding steam engines on steamboats. After calls for a solution in two State of the Union addresses, a Senate Select Committee met to consider an investigative report from the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, the first federally funded investigation into a technical.

This multi-disciplinary collection interrogates the role of human rights in addressing past injustices. The volume draws on legal scholars, political scientists, anthropologists and political philosophers grappling with the weight of the memory of historical injustices arising from conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Australasia. It examines the role of human rights as legal doctrine, rhetoric and policy as developed by states, international organizations, regional groups and non-governmental bodies. The authors question whether faith in human rights is justified as balm to heal past injustice or whether such faith nourishes both victimhood and self-justification. These issues are explored through three discrete sections: moments of memory and injustice, addressing injustice; and questions of faith. In each of these sections, authors address the manner in which memory of past conflicts and injustice haunt our contemporary understanding of human rights. The volume questions whether the expectation that human rights law can deal with past injustice has undermined the development of an emancipatory politics of human rights for our current world.

Questions of legal extraterritoriality figure prominently in scholarship on legal pluralism, transnational legal studies, international investment law, international human rights law, state responsibility under international law, and a large number of other areas. Yet many accounts of extraterritoriality make little effort to grapple with its thorny conceptual history, shifting theoretical valence, and complex political roots and ramifications. This book brings together thirteen scholars of law, history, and politics in order to reconsider the history, theory, and contemporary relevance of legal extraterritoriality. Situating questions of extraterritoriality in a set of broader investigations into state-building, imperialist rivalry, capitalist expansion, and human rights protection, it tracks the multiple meanings and functions of a distinct and far-reaching mode of legal authority. The fundamental aim of the volume is to examine the different geographical contexts in which extraterritorial regimes have developed, the political and economic pressures in response to which such regimes have grown, the highly uneven distributions of extraterritorial privilege that have resulted from these processes, and the complex theoretical quandaries to which this type of privilege has given rise. The book will be of considerable interest to scholars in law, history, political science, socio-legal studies, international relations, and legal geography.

In Liberalizing Contracts Anat Rosenberg examines nineteenth-century liberal thought in England, as developed through, and as it developed, the concept of contract, understood as the formal legal category of binding agreement, and the relations and human practices at which it gestured, most basically that of promise, most broadly the capitalist market order. She does so by placing canonical realist novels in conversation with legal-historical knowledge about Victorian contracts. Rosenberg argues that current understandings of the liberal effort in contracts need reconstructing from both ends of Henry Maine's famed aphorism, which described a historical progress "from status to contract." On the side of contract, historical accounts of its liberal content have been oscillating between atomism and social-collective approaches, missing out on forms of relationality in Victorian liberal conceptualizations of contracts which the book establishes in their complexity, richness, and wavering appeal. On the side of status, the expectation of a move "from status" has led to a split along the liberal/radical fault line among those assessing liberalism's historical commitment to promote mobility and equality. The split misses out on the possibility that liberalism functioned as a historical reinterpretation of statuses - particularly gender and class - rather than either an effort of their elimination or preservation. As Rosenberg shows, that reinterpretation effectively secured, yet also altered, gender and class hierarchies. There is no teleology to such an account.

For more than century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading goods, supplying credit, and seeking work. This all changed with the war and as India, Burma, Ceylon, and Malaya wrested independence from the British empire. Set against the tumult of the postwar period,Boats in a Storm centers on the legal struggles of migrants to retain their traditional rhythms and patterns of life, illustrating how they experienced citizenship and decolonization. Even as nascent citizenship regimes and divergent political trajectories of decolonization papered over migrations between South and Southeast Asia, migrants continued to recount cross-border histories in encounters with the law. These accounts, often obscured by national and international political developments, unsettle the notion that static national identities and loyalties had emerged, fully formed and unblemished by migrant pasts, in the aftermath of empires. Drawing on archival materials from India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, London, and Singapore, Kalyani Ramnath narrates how former migrants battled legal requirements to revive prewar circulations of credit, capital, and labor, in a postwar context of rising ethno-nationalisms that accused migrants of stealing jobs and hoarding land. Ultimately, Ramnath shows how decolonization was marked not only by shipwrecked empires and nation-states assembled and ordered from the debris of imperial collapse, but also by these forgotten stories of wartime displacements, their unintended consequences, and long afterlives.

The 1980s was a time of significant social, political and cultural change. In Australia, the law was pivotal to these changes. The two High Court cases that this book explores - Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen (1982) and the Tasmanian Dams case (1983) - are famous legally as they marked a decisive reckoning by the Court with both international law and federal constitutionalism. Yet these cases also offer a significant marker of Australia in the 1980s: a shift to a different form of political engagement, nationally and internationally, on complex questions about race and the environment. This book brings these cases together for the first time. It does so to explore not only the legal legacy and relationship between Koowarta and Tasmanian Dams, but also to reflect on how Australians experience their law in time and place, and why those experiences might require more than the usual legal records. The authors include significant figures in Australian public life, some of whom were key participants in the cases, as well as established and respected scholars of law, history, environment and Indigenous studies. This collection offers a combination of personal recollections of the cases, as well as a consideration of their ongoing significance in Australian life. This book was originally published as two special issues of the Griffith Law Review.

Law's Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice and Religion explains the development of the two basic systems of public and private law and their historical transformations. Examining the historical development of law in China, Japan, Western Europe, and Hispanic America, Haley argues that law is a product, rather than a constitutive element, of political systems.Four narrative chapters commence with the development of Chinese legal tradition as a public law order in which regulatory and penal rules were central, compared to the primacy of private law in Western Europe. China was not only among the earliest but also historically the most enduring example of public law order. The European Legal Tradition, in contrast, became the source of the private law structures of legal systems worldwide. The Japanese and Hispanic American experiences are explored as pivotal links that help to identify foundational factors that underpin the historical development of public and private law orders. Also explained in both contexts is the endurance of private ordering both within and beyond the law. These vivid comparisons and analyses in these stories of rivers, rifles, rice, and religion will serve as an excellent critical resource for scholars and academics of comparative law and legal theory.

Published to coincide with the ACLU's centennial, a major new book by the nationally celebrated journalist and bestselling author For a century, the American Civil Liberties Union has fought to keep Americans in touch with the founding values of the Constitution. As its centennial approached, the organization invited Ellis Cose to become its first ever writer-in-residence, with complete editorial independence. The result is Cose's groundbreaking Democracy, If We Can Keep It: The ACLU's 100-Year Fight for Rights in America, the most authoritative account ever of America's premier defender of civil liberties. A vivid work of history and journalism, Democracy, If We Can Keep It is not just the definitive story of the ACLU but also an essential account of America's rediscovery of rights it had granted but long denied. Cose's narrative begins with World War I and brings us to today, chronicling the ACLU's role through the horrors of 9/11, the saga of Edward Snowden, and the phenomenon of Donald Trump. A chronicle of America's most difficult ethical quandaries from the Red Scare, the Scottsboro Boys' trials, Japanese American internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam, Democracy, If We Can Keep It weaves these accounts into a deeper story of American freedom--one that is profoundly relevant to our present moment.

It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country's history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices' respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.

How do lawyers, judges and jurors read novels? And what is at stake when literature and law confront each other in the courtroom? Nineteenth-century England and France are remembered for their active legal prosecution of literature, and this book examines the ways in which five novels were interpreted in the courtroom: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Paul Bonnetain's Charlot s'amuse, Henry Vizetelly's English translation of Emile Zola's La Terre, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It argues that each of these novels attracted legal censure because they presented figures of sexual dissidence - the androgyne, the onanist or masturbator, the patricide, the homosexual and the lesbian - that called into question an increasingly fragile normative, middleclass masculinity. Offering close readings of the novels themselves, and of legal material from the proceedings, such as the trial transcripts and judicial opinions, the book addresses both the doctrinal dimensions of Victorian obscenity and censorship, as well as the reading practices at work in the courtroom. It situates the cases in their historical context, and highlights how each trial constitutes a scene of reading - an encounter between literature and the law - through which different forms of masculinity were shaped, bolstered or challenged.

This volume analyses the importance of property rights on land which were transformed by the British in the form of colonial land revenue system in Andhra region of Madras Presidency. It initiates a discussion of the traditional production systems like irrigation, agricultural methods, etc., which were replaced by the colonial ones. It further shows how the small peasantry suffered under the new system. This book also deals with the relations between the colonial state, rich peasants, zamindars and peasants under the ryotwary and zamindary settlements, which were introduced at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It further examines how the peasantry lost their rights on lands and how it went under the control of merchants and rich peasant moneylenders. Consequently, de-peasantization, wage labour, and general agrarian impoverishment followed. The colonial legal system favoured zamindars, landlords and rich peasants against small peasants, who could not go to colonial courts due to heavy legal costs. The volume analyses in minute detail various Acts, which affected the property rights of peasants on their lands. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.