Key Reading

• Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, chapter 8
  

Seminar Reading

• J. S. Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1500-1800
• J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800
• Libby Connors, 'Sentencing on a colonial frontier: Judge Therry's decisions at Moreton Bay', Legal History, 2008
• J Davis, 'A poor man's system of justice: the London police courts', Historical Journal, 1984
• D. Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow (eds), Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England
• D. Hay, 'Controlling the English Prosecutor', Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 1983
• D. Hay and F. Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in England
• Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740-1820
• Peter King, Crime and Law in England
• J. H. Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 45 (1978), pp. 263–316.
• J. H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial
• A. H. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of England and Wales, 1750-1950
• Simon Devereaux and Paul Griffiths (eds), Penal Practice and Culture, 1500-1900: Punishing the English
• Roland Quinault, 'The Warwickshire County Magistracy and Public Order', in John Stevenson and Roland Quinault, Popular Protest and Public Order
• L. Radzinowicz, History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750
• G. Rude, Criminal and Victim: Crime and Society in Nineteenth Century England
• Robert Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System 1750-1965
• Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the criminal : culture, law and policy in England, 1830-1914
• Martin J. Wiener, ‘Judges v. jurors : courtroom tensions in murder trials and the law of criminal responsibility in nineteenth-century England’, Law and History Review, 17 (1999), pp. 467-506.
• J. M. Beattie, ‘Scales of Justice: Defence Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Law and History Review, 9 (1991), pp. 221–67.
• David J. A. Cairns, Advocacy and the making of the adversarial criminal trial, 1800-1865
• S. Landsman, ‘The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England’, Cornell Law Review, 75 (1990), pp. 498–609.
• Symposium, ‘The Origins of the Adversary Criminal Trial’, Journal of Legal History, 28:1 (2005), pp. 63–89

Questions

• Whar were the significant changes in prosecution and court practices?
  
• Did sentencing practices differ according to a defendant's class, status, gender, race etc?
• Explain the different court systems
  
• What were the deterrents to prosecuting crimes?
  
• When and why did Britain adopt an adversarial court system?
• What was the role of lawyers?
  
• How biased were magistrates?
  
• How common was trial by jury?
  
• Were there changes in popular attitudes towards criminals and victims in this period?