Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: D. Rabin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England

Identity, Crime and Legal Responsibility in Eighteenth-Century England PDF Author: D. Rabin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230505090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
During the eighteenth century English defendants, victims, witnesses, judges, and jurors spoke a language of the mind. With their reputations or lives at stake, men and women presented their complex emotions and passions as grounds for acquittal or mitigation of punishment. Inside the courtroom the language of excuse reshaped crimes and punishments, signalling a shift in the age-old negotiation of mitigation. Outside the courtroom the language of the mind reflected society's preoccupation with questions of sensibility, responsibility, and the self.

Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England

Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century England PDF Author: Frank McLynn
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136093168
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
McLynn provides the first comprehensive view of crime and its consequences in the eighteenth century: why was England notorious for violence? Why did the death penalty prove no deterrent? Was it a crude means of redistributing wealth?

Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century

Criminal Justice During the Long Eighteenth Century PDF Author: David Lemmings
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429678460
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
This book applies three overlapping bodies of work to generate fresh approaches to the study of criminal justice in England and Ireland between 1660 and 1850. First, crime and justice are interpreted as elements of the "public sphere" of opinion about government. Second, "performativity" and speech act theory are considered in the context of the Anglo-Irish criminal trial, which was transformed over the course of this period from an unmediated exchange between victim and accused to a fully lawyerized performance. Thirdly, the authors apply recent scholarship on the history of emotions, particularly relating to the constitution of "emotional communities" and changes in "emotional regimes".

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion

Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion PDF Author: Katie Barclay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000619842
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Cultural Histories of Law, Media and Emotion: Public Justice explores how the legal history of long-eighteenth-century Britain has been transformed by the cultural turn, and especially the associated history of emotion. Seeking to reflect on the state of the field, 13 essays by leading and emerging scholars bring cutting-edge research to bear on the intersections between law, print culture and emotion in Britain across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Divided into three sections, this collection explores the ‘public’ as a site of legal sensibility; it demonstrates how the rhetoric of emotion constructed the law in legal practice and in society and culture; and it highlights how approaches from cultural and emotions history have recentred the individual, the biography and the group to explain long-running legal-historical problems. Across this volume, authors evidence how engagements between cultural and legal history have revitalised our understanding of law’s role in eighteenth-century culture and society, not least deepening our understanding of justice as produced with and through the public. This volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars interested in the history of emotions as well as the legal history of Britain from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

In Search of Criminal Responsibility

In Search of Criminal Responsibility PDF Author: Nicola Lacey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199248206
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable tof punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history.

Manifest Madness

Manifest Madness PDF Author: Arlie Loughnan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199698597
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Bringing together previously disparate discussions on criminal responsibility from law, psychology, and philosophy, this book provides a close study of mental incapacity defences, tracing their development through historical cases to the modern era.

Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740-1820

Crime, Justice and Discretion in England 1740-1820 PDF Author: Peter King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191543756
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description
The criminal law has often been seen as central to the rule of the eighteenth-century landed élite in England. This book presents a detailed analysis of the judicial processs - of victims' reactions, pretrial practices, policing, magistrates hearings, trials, sentencing, pardoning and punishment - using property offenders as its main focus. The period 1740-1820 - the final era before the coming of the new police and the repeal of the capital code - emerges as the great age of discretionary justice, and the book explores the impact of the vast discretionary powers held by many social groups. It reassesses both the relationship between crime rates and the economic deprivation, and the many ways that vulnerability to prosecution varied widely across the lifecycle, in the light of the highly selective nature of pretrial negotiations. More centrally, by asking at every stage - who used the law, for what purposes, in whose interests and with what social effects - it opens up a number of new perspectives on the role of the law in eighteenth-century social relations. The law emerges as less the instrument of particular élite groups and more as an arena of struggle, of negotiation, and of compromise. Its rituals were less controllable and its merciful moments less manageable and less exclusively available to the gentry élite than has been previously suggested. Justice was vulnerable to power, but was also mobilised to constrain it. Despite the key functions that the propertied fulfilled, courtroom crowds, the counter-theatre of the condemned, and the decisions of the victims from a very wide range of backgrounds had a role to play, and the criteria on which decisions were based were shaped as much by the broad and more humane discourse which Fielding called the 'good mind' as by the instrumental needs of the propertied élites.

Whores and Highwaymen

Whores and Highwaymen PDF Author: Gregory J. Durston
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 1908162198
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 683

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Book Description
The ‘whores’ and ‘highwaymen’ of Gregory Durston’s title are just some of the dubious characters met within this absorbing work, including thief-takers, trading justices, an upstart legal profession whose lower orders developed various ways to line their own pockets and magistrates and clerks who often preferred dealing with those cases which attracted fees. The book shows how little was planned by government or the authorities, and how much sprang up due to the efforts of individuals—so that the origins of social control, particularly at a local level, had much to do with personal ideas of morality, class boundaries and perceived threats, serious and otherwise. Based on news reports, Old Bailey and local archives, and other solid records the book weaves a compelling picture of a critical time in English history, through the voices of contemporary observers as well as the best of writings by experts ever since. At its broadest point, the book spans the period from the Glorious Revolution to the early 1820s. It falls into three parts: Crime and the Metropolis—including Metropolitan crime, attitudes to crime and policing, explanations for crime, and criminal law and procedure. Policing—including policing the metropolis, constables, the watch, beadles, the role of the military, and the detection of crime. Justice—including the magistracy and its work, ways of prosecution, trial in the lower and higher courts, and the penal regimes of the day. A colourful account, which captures the essence of the period.

Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830

Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 PDF Author: Norma Landau
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139433261
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This book examines how the law was made, defined, administered, and used in eighteenth-century England. A team of leading international historians explore the ways in which legal concerns and procedures came to permeate society and reflect on eighteenth-century concepts of corruption, oppression, and institutional efficiency. These themes are pursued throughout in a broad range of contributions which include studies of magistrates and courts; the forcible enlistment of soldiers and sailors; the eighteenth-century 'bloody code'; the making of law basic to nineteenth-century social reform; the populace's extension of law's arena to newspapers; theologians' use of assumptions basic to English law; Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's concept of the liberty intrinsic to England; and Blackstone's concept of the framework of English law. The result is an invaluable account of the legal bases of eighteenth-century society which is essential reading for historians at all levels.

Self, Others and the State

Self, Others and the State PDF Author: Arlie Loughnan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108754961
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Criminal responsibility is now central to criminal law, but it is in need of re-examination. In the context of Australian criminal laws, Self, Others and the State reassesses the general assumptions made about the rise to prominence of criminal responsibility in the period since around the turn of the twentieth century. It reconsiders the role of criminal responsibility in criminal law, arguing that criminal responsibility is significant because it organises key sets of relations - between self, others and the state - as relations of responsibility. Detailed studies of decisive moments and developments since the turn of the twentieth century, and original explorations of relations of responsibility, expose the complexity and dynamism of criminal responsibility and reveal that it is the means by which matters of subjectivity, relationality and power make themselves felt in the criminal law.