At his coronation the monarch swore to preserve the peace of the kingdom, maintain the laws and customs of the realm and diligently do justice to his subjects. Upholding these tenets underpinned the successful exercise of kingship. Indeed, the quality of the king’s rule was frequently judged contemporaneously and historically by his record on justice. Yet, while the king did have personal input and was ultimately responsible for issuing legislative decrees and upholding law and order, operationally this was not something he could do on his own. The enormous task of day-to-day judicial administration was delegated to a mixture of trained judges, lawyers and royal officials, who worked alongside less specialised men of law, shire bureaucrats and a pool of borough merchants and county gentry. These assisted the crown by acting on a variety of local commissions and as constituency representatives in parliament.

The chapter offers a critical social-historical and theoretical framework to analyze transitional justice politics in Eastern Europe, particularly Polish lustration, in the global post-Cold War moment marked by the proclamations of the “end of history” and ideology, the “moral turn,” the memory boom, the rise of human rights and rule-of-law imaginaries, neoliberal globalization, and their crises and alleged ends today. The chapter unpacks the concept of moral autopsy, which underpins transitional justice efforts such as lustration and reconstructs communism as a dead and ruinous past and criminality, the truth of which it seeks to trace and dissect in the persons associated with communism, especially communist secret service. The chapter focuses on the themes of truth-telling, deception, and treason articulated by moral autopsy and Polish lustration, and places them in the context of postsocialist contradictions of liberal legal and capitalist transformations. The chapter discusses the key methodological orientations of the book, particularly the conditions of ethnographic research on lustration, marked by pervasive suspicion of betrayal and moralization of politics and history.

Medieval English law set the killing of a husband by his wife apart from most other homicides, because it was perceived as particularly serious and disruptive of the social order. Husband-killers were burned, not hanged, as a spectacular demonstration of condemnation and concern for this social problem. As this chapter shows, however, husband-killing also presented legal problems. There was a doctrinal puzzle in terms of the unclear extent to which this offence should be assimilated to treason, as opposed to homicide: the later distinction between ‘high treason’ against the king, crown or government, and ‘petty treason’ against a domestic superior did not come into being as neatly as sometimes assumed. There were also struggles on a procedural level, as attempts were made to fit husband-killing into common law modes of prosecution, prompting some creative strategies on the part of those seeking to secure a conviction.

Rebecca West’s novel of ideas, The Birds Fall Down, responds to the intense debate around capital punishment that took place in the UK after the Second World War. Partly motivated by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, which West attended as a journalist, this debate led to the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill in 1947 and the establishment of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1949. Alongside other public intellectuals, West acted as an honorary member of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, founded in 1955. In such non-fictional works as Black Lamb, Grey Falcon and A Train of Powder, West reflects on the meaning of justice and the appropriateness of punishment for murder, assassination, and crimes against humanity. In The Birds Fall Down, she extends her reflections to the political utility of assassination and the wisdom required to pass judgment on crimes and criminals.

Catalogues the most common category of federal impeachments, that of federal judges. Describes all judicial impeachments and discusses the arguably different standard of impeachable conduct for judges.

Continental nations still used spectacular modes of execution – especially breaking on the wheel or decapitation by sword – upon common criminals during the eighteenth century. In England, bloody and prolonged executions were inflicted solely upon traitors. Moreover, the fullest horrors of the traitor’s death – disembowelment while still alive, and the long-term post-mortem display of the head and quarters – were largely dispensed with by the end of the seventeenth century. These changes had two major causes: a sense of the limits of what might be tolerated in a genteel and rapidly growing metropolis; and the desire of governments – especially constitutional monarchies after 1689 – not to discredit themselves by displaying an excessive thirst for blood in punishing enemies. These considerations, coupled with the occasional need to execute traitors after 1689, also precluded the use of aggravated execution rituals against the other two categories of traitor: coiners and petty traitors.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.

This chapter completes our examination of the long Plantagenet period, which culminated in the bloody War of the Roses. However, as the chapter title makes plain, the focus is on the impact that the deadly plague of this period had upon law and order. The chapter explores the different interpretations made of the importance of the Black Death and surveys developments of this period such as the origins of what we would today call employment law, significant increases in the effectiveness of the administration of justice chiefly through increased powers for justices of the peace and important developments in both law of obligations (exploring how actions on the case developed from the writ of trespass and how it further developed into the action on the case for assumpsit) and the criminal law (focusing on treason and murder).

Chapter 5 is structured according to the uses for which noble clients commissioned magic. The range of uses is broader than the five identified for other social classes and they have therefore been grouped under three wider ambitions: political or social advancement; money; and practicalities. By structuring the discussion in this way we are able to interrogate the motivations behind the upper classes’ use of magic, and investigate the role it played in elite culture. The conclusion of this discussion is that the few aristocratic magic cases that survive are indicative of a wider culture of use

This chapter focuses on how and when elite persons employed magicians; what sort of relationship was enjoyed between employer and employee; and how such relationships were allowed to continue in a courtly context. Through the course of this discussion we see that the culture of magic use among the elite was substantially different to that of society more broadly. For example, whereas generally the lower classes had a ‘pay per use’ arrangement with service magicians, upper classes were more in the habit of keeping magicians as part of their household, normally requesting the services from a cleric on retainer. The implications of this, and other habits peculiar to the elite, are explored in some detail.

The Río de la Plata, the location itself and the journeys towards that destination, hit by failure and discouragement, helped build hostile discourse about the land but also gave rise to a series of scenes about what has not been found before. Therefore, new ways of envisaging this land came to light, as well as the denunciations of Europeans’ excesses. This chapter studies the legal environment where stories of hostility and degradation reveal the forgotten voice of the plebs. The conquest and colonization of the Rio de la Plata then functions not only as the creator of a discourse of deception but also as a scenario that enables the rising of the marginalized voice of seamen, among others.

The rioting and looting after Henry Hunt’s great reform meeting on Spa Fields on 3 December 1816 marked a turning point in Thistlewood’s career. Its failure led to his attempt to flee to America, to his capture, and in June 1817 to the aborted treason trial of Watson, Preston, Thistlewood, and Hooper. This collapsed once it was shown to be based on the evidence of the spy John Castle.Henceforth Thistlewood was a marked man on the extremist edges of London radicalism.

This chapter provides an overview of the Gestapo and political policing in Government District Düsseldorf. The origins of ministerial independence are traced through laws, precedents, and power struggles that recast political police as a “special authority” removed from administrative oversight. The origins of preventative police justice outline how Himmler carved out a new mandate of prevention without encroaching on punishment through the courts under the cover of policy and law regulating arbitrary “protective custody” in concentration camps. An overview of politico-economic geography then underlines the importance attributed to suppressing dissent in this strategically vital district with historically low support for Nazism. Generational biography of regional personnel further details how this conditioned a shared institutional culture defined by the defeat of 1918 and communist uprisings in the Rhineland. Finally, tectonic shifts in case load identify inflection points in 1935 as the Gestapo pursued organized resistance into society at large, and in 1943 when case load plummeted as attention shifted to suppressing a slave revolt.

This chapter turns to the use of ad hominem legislation to authorise the detention in the Cape of Zulu political prisoners, removed from Natal. It examines the cases of the Hlubi chief Langalibalele and the Zulu kings Cetshwayo and Dinuzulu. Each attracted the support of the family of Bishop J. W. Colenso, who drew the attention of the public in Britain to their cases. Langalibalele was banished from Natal in 1874, after a ‘customary’ trial presided over by Governor Benjamin Pine for rebellion. Although the trial attracted much criticism from the Colonial Office for violating the rule of law, political sensibilities ensured that Langalibalele remained in detention. He was soon joined by Cetshwayo, who was initially held as a prisoner of war but then detained at the Cape under another special ordinance. His subsequent release owed more to his importance for the political settlement of Zululand than to concerns about the rule of law. However, concerns that the rule of law be seen to be upheld – and the experience of Langalibalele not be repeated – informed British attitudes towards the trial of Dinuzulu for rebellion in 1889, which ended in his exile to St Helena under sentence.

This essay explores the significance of genealogy and inheritance in Shakespeare’s history plays; specifically, the idea that national and racial characteristics were passed down through the generations in the blood. The word "race" is often applied to peoples produced by the intermingling of different lineages and with different characteristics. The essay shows that such issues were important not just for royal dynasties but for the people they ruled, as is demonstrated through readings of King Henry V, King Richard II, and King John. When races are imagined in such ways the word "bastard" assumes particular importance, as the progeny of two different people(s) taking on new characteristics from a combination of those of the parents. Shakespeare demonstrates in his English history plays that nations and races are never pure, but are always intermingled, compromised, revitalized, and constantly transformed by their union with other peoples, especially the neighbours in terms of whom they define themselves.

The Nuremberg trials largely focused on foreign forced labour brought to the Reich, and Norway was a large net receiver as well (whereas most other occupied countries were net suppliers). Therefore, the overall question guiding this chapter is why the nexus between excessive war profits and exploitation of forced labour was so weak during the Norwegian legal settlement. The answer takes account of the fact that the focus on exploitation of forced labour at Nuremberg and subsequent tribunals corresponded to norms inherent in international law (war crimes, crimes against humanity) whereas the Norwegian neglect followed from a strict framing of national law. Cases related to criminal commercial collaboration were pursued from the perspective of national treason. Because the Allies had agreed that each country should prosecute war crimes against its nationals, Norwegian jurisprudence was allowed to sustain its bias towards national treason. This meant that Norwegian businesses which had in various ways been involved in the Nazi slave labour program were never properly investigated for possible exploitation of foreign forced labour. Consequently, whereas German historiography has elaborated the nexus between forced labour and war profits, the Norwegian counterpart has not.