Distributed for University of London Press
Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Law
Writing the history of law involves choices: whose stories are to be told, and how?
While earlier scholarship centered on judges, lawyers, and legislators, recent work increasingly examines the experiences of women, colonial subjects, and gender-nonconforming people, using new sources and methods. Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Lawpresents research on the boundaries between legal insiders and outsiders across seven centuries of British legal history.
Drawing on underused records from contexts ranging from medieval Wales to twentieth-century British India, the chapters explore how individuals became insiders or outsiders, how the law treated them, and how they used legal processes. This book highlights the fluidity of this divide and calls for a more representative legal history.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
Gwen Seabourne and Joanna McCunn2 Local customs and central powers in the ‘long twelfth century’. England and Italy compared
Attilio Stella3 "All those men who are not of the law of Rome": participation and exclusion of non-Latin plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and clerks in the courts of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
Jennifer Pearce4 Sir John Vavasour (d. 1506) and the Palatine of Lancaster: lawyer, judge, Northerner
Ashley Hannay5 Inside and outside the palace: Henry VIII’s queens at law
Anthony Musson and Kirsty Wright6 Miscegenation and racial passing in 1700s colonial Jamaica
Justine Collins7 Libellous letters and gender nonconformity: the Chevalier d’Eon in the English law courts, 1763–77
Daniel F. Gosling8 Judicial insiders: the Coleridge dynasty
Philip Handler9 Law reform in the age of Henry Brougham: A legal biographical interpretation
Patricia McMahon10 The jury system of Bristol, 1919–1939
Kay Crosby11 Insiders and outsiders in legal history: concluding thoughts
David Sugarman