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Writing the history of law involves choices: whose stories are to be told, and how? Traditionally, legal history has focused on influential ‘insiders’ like judges, lawyers and legislators, and on studying the records they produced. Today, increasing attention is being paid to the lives of ‘outsiders’, drawing on new sources and methods to understand their experiences of the law.
This book brings together new research that examines dividing lines drawn in the history of law and the experiences of those who have fallen inside and outside them. From prominent judges and law reformers to women, colonial subjects and gender nonconforming people, and from medieval Crusader states to twentieth-century England, this book examines the legal encounters of a wide range of individuals and communities. The authors explore how people became legal insiders or outsiders, how the law treated them, and how they sought to wield legal processes to their advantage. They demonstrate the malleability and contingency of any insider/outsider binary. From the Tudor queens of England to mixed-race people in colonial Jamaica, legal actors have transcended boundaries and interacted with law in potent and unexpected ways.
At this pivotal moment for legal history, this book prompts conversation between those engaged in legal and historical studies and legal practice, and demonstrates the potential for a reinvigorated and representative legal history to improve our understandings of law’s past.
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Introduction
Joanna McCunn and Gwen Seabourne -
1 "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 Pearce -
2 Sir John Vavasour (d. 1506) and the Palatine of Lancaster: lawyer, judge, Northerner
A J Hannay -
3 Inside and outside the palace: Henry VIII’s queens at law
Anthony Musson and Kirsty Wright -
4 Racial Passing and Miscegenation in Colonial Jamaica
Justine Collins -
5 ‘Being interpreted and translated into the English language’: the Chevalier d’Éon, the French outsider, in the English Law Courts, 1764-1776
Daniel F. Gosling -
6 ‘A Scottish Judge’: Law Reform in the Age of Henry Brougham - An Outsider’s Influence
Patricia McMahon -
7 Judicial insiders: the Coleridge dynasty
Philip Handler -
10 Jurors and Jury Service in Interwar Bristol
Kay Crosby -
11 Closing reflections: beyond insiders and outsiders
Joanna McCunn and Gwen Seabourne