Edited by Diane Kirkby

This collection brings methods and questions from humanities, law and social sciences disciplines to examine different instances of lawmaking. Contributors explore the problematic of past law in present historical analysis across indigenous Australia and New Zealand, from post-Franco Spain to current international law and maritime regulation, from settler colonial humanitarian debates to efforts to end cruelty to children and animals. They highlight problems both national and international in their implication. From different disciplines and theoretical positions, they illustrate the diverse and complex study of law’s history.

Canberra: Australian National University, 2011. 236p.

By John W. Wertheimer

This first title in the “Law, Literature & Culture” series uses six legal disputes from the South Carolina courts to illuminate the complex legal history of race in the U.S. South from slavery through Jim Crow. The first two cases—one criminal, one civil—both illuminate the extreme oppressiveness of slavery. The third explores labor relations between newly emancipated Black agricultural workers and white landowners during Reconstruction. The remaining cases investigate three prominent features of the Jim Crow system: segregated schools, racially biased juries, and lynching, respectively. Throughout the century under consideration, South Carolina’s legal system obsessively drew racial lines, always to the detriment of non-white people, but it occasionally provided a public forum within which racial oppression could be challenged. The book emphasizes how dramatically the degree of legal oppressiveness experienced by Black South Carolinians varied during the century under study, based largely on the degree of Black access to political and legal power.

Amherst College Press, 2023.

Edited And Translated By Carl Stephenson And Frederick George Marcham

FROM THE PREFACE: “ In organizing a book of this sort, and one that must be kept to a useful size for an elementary course, the most difficult task is that of selection. Possibly half the available space must be assigned to the great monuments that everybody considers essen- tial. But from all the other accumulated records of thirteen cen- turies just what shall be taken? Constantly faced with the embarrassing duty of excluding one document in order to include another, we have in general sought to be guided by the experience of the class-room--to govern our choice by the needs of the ordinary student. And above all else we have prized direct informa- tion concerning the organs of government….”.

London. Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1937. 933p. USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Trevor J. Saunders

This book assesses Plato's penal code within the tradition of Greek penology. Saunders provides a detailed exposition of the emergence of the concept of publicly controlled, rationally calculated, and socially directed punishment in the period between Homer and Plato. He outlines the serious debate that ensued in the fifth century over the opposition by philosophers to popular judicial assumptions, and shows how the philosophical arguments gradually gained ground. He demonstrates that Plato advanced the most radical of the philosophical formulations of the concept of punishment in his Laws, arguing that punishment is or should be utilitarian and strictly reformative. This first comprehensive and detailed study of Plato's penology gives deserved attention to the works of a most important political and legal thinker.

Oxford, UK; New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford, 1991. 438p.

By Joanna Carraway Vitiello

This book examines the administration of justice in the small northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia at the end of the fourteenth century. Through an examination of material from the judicial archives from the period 1371-1409, this study investigates the development of public justice, inquisition procedure, and dispute resolution in late medieval Reggio Emilia, also incorporating comparative material, especially archival material from Bologna at the end of the fourteenth century. This study seeks to add to the discussion on dispute resolution and court processes in late medieval Europe, moving the discussion outside the major urban centers of late medieval Italy to the periphery of urban life.

Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2016. 232p.

By Jamie K. Taylor.  

Throughout the Middle Ages, witnessing was a crucial way religious and legal “truths” were understood and produced. Religious and secular officials alike harnessed the power of testimony to assert doctrinal, political, or legal responsibilities. Swearing an oath, testifying in court, and signing a deposition were common ways to shape and discipline both devotional and legal communities. In Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages, Jamie K. Taylor traces depictions of witnessing in a wide range of late medieval texts and shows how witnessing practices formed and reformed, policed and challenged medieval communities. Through close study of texts like the Man of Law’s Tale and Piers Plowman alongside sermon exempla, common law statutes, and pastoral treatises, Fictions of Evidence argues that devotional and legal witnessing practices offered medieval writers a distinct vocabulary they could use to expose how the ethical and legal obligations to one’s community were constructed. And since vernacular writers often challenged the ways ecclesiastical or secular authorities asserted community bonds, they found they could use those same witnessing practices and language to imagine extra-legal or extra-ecclesiastical communities that followed different ethical codes.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013. 232p

By Hugo Munsterberg.

A pioneering treatise of applied psychology that examines the mind of the witness on the witness stand, noting that the field was (at that time) “absurdly neglected.” Topics ranged from the memory of the witness, detection of crime, untrue confessions, hypnotism and prevention of crime.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1908) 269 pages.

By William Godwin

…and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness. 4th ed.. in 2 Volumes. Vol. l. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness is a 1793 book by the philosopher William Godwin, in which the author outlines his political philosophy. It is the first modern work to expound anarchism.

London: J. Watson, 1912. 244p.

By Hugo Munsterberg.

Essays on Psychology and Crime. “There are about fifty psychological laboratories in the United States alone. The average educated man has hitherto not noticed this. If he chances to hear of such places, he fancies that they serve for mental healing, or telepathic mysteries, or spiritistic performances. What else can a laboratory have to do with the mind? Has not the soul been for two thousand years the domain of the philosopher? What has psychology to do with electric batteries and intricate machines? Too often have I read such questions in the faces of visiting friends who came to the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in Emerson Hall and found, with surprise, twenty-seven rooms over spun with electric wires and filled with chronoscopes and kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs, and a mechanic busy at his work.”

New York: Doubleday, 1908. 269p.

By Raymond Fosdick.

The Cleveland Foundation survey of the administration of criminal justice in Cleveland Ohio. Directed and Edited by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1922) 742 pages.

By Enrico Ferri. Translated by Edgar Betts.

Report and Preliminary Project for an Italian Penal Code, In both Italian and a rare English translation by Edgar Betts. This “model penal code” as it would be called today, though never adopted by Italy, formed the basis for many penal codes in communist and socialist countries around the world, in particular Cuba. The concepts of criminal intent and criminal responsibility remained (and still do) the devilishly sticky point for this and all criminal codes, especially when faced with the criticisms by social scientists that economic deprivation among many other factors may constitute powerful external “causes” of crime, thus muddying the waters considerably concerning individuals’ responsibility for their criminal acts.

Royal Commission for the Reform of the Penal Statutes. Italy. ca. 1920. 180p.