A Jurisprudence of Power
Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law
Published on 8. December 2005
Book
Hardback
544 pages
978-0-19-826076-9 (ISBN)
Description
A Jurisprudence of Power concerns the brutal suppression under martial law of the Jamaica uprising of 1865, and the explosive debate and litigation these events spawned in England. The book explores the centrality of legal ideas and institutions in English politics, and of political ideas that give rise to great questions of English law.
It documents how the world's most powerful and articulate political elite struggled with fundamental questions about law, morality, and power. Can a constitutional state rule a sprawling empire without breaking faith with the rule of law? Can it contend with the violent resistance of subjugated peoples without corrupting the integrity of its legal and political ideals?
The book addresses these questions as it reconstructs the most prolonged and important conflict over martial law and the rule of law in the history of England in the nineteenth century.
It documents how the world's most powerful and articulate political elite struggled with fundamental questions about law, morality, and power. Can a constitutional state rule a sprawling empire without breaking faith with the rule of law? Can it contend with the violent resistance of subjugated peoples without corrupting the integrity of its legal and political ideals?
The book addresses these questions as it reconstructs the most prolonged and important conflict over martial law and the rule of law in the history of England in the nineteenth century.
Reviews / Votes
..Kostal's arguments..are insightful, persuasive, and of read scholarly merit. * The Law and Politics Book Review * ..a brilliantly timed monograph..it provides a wonderful way into the actual operation of the law of empire and that law's troubled place in Anglo-American constitutionalism..helps to make sense of critical features of twenty-first century American legal debates. Kostal's book does this beautifully. It deserves a large audience. * John Witt, Harvard Law Review * ...much that is revealing emerges in Kostal s tracing of these events...Arguably the most important thing about the Jamaica Committee was not its methods or their outcome but its crystallisation of a clutch of issues which have changed in shape but not in essence in the intervening years. Law and order are still not the same thing. * Lord Justice Stephen Sedley, London Review of Books * I have no hesitation in saying that Professor Kostal is among the very best scholars of the legal history of the Victorian era. [He is] a legal historian who is an exhaustive researcher. The breadth of the material he interrogates is quite astounding prodigious and thorough.' * Professor John McLaren * The book makes a significant contribution to both Victorian and imperial historiography. [It] is based on remarkable historical and legal research that synthesizes law and history in brilliant fashion. A Jurisprudence of Power offers a richly textured and carefully nuanced study of the oft-quoted 'rule of law', ...Drawing on an impressive and diverse range of published and manuscript sources, and presented in crisp and compelling prose,A Jurisprudence of Power exposes the contradictions which threatened the application of English law in a colonial context....Kostal has..made a significant contribution to the history of English law. * Canadian Historical Association * [An] excellent book...[that] is an important injection of law into both the imperial history and British political history of the late-nineteenth century. * The Cambridge Law Journal *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Historians, and scholars specializing in English legal and political history, the history of imperialism, the history of law, the rule of law, emergency law, and martial law.
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 34 mm
Weight
975 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-826076-9 (9780198260769)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
08/2008
Oxford University Press
€82.20
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
R.W. Kostal is a Professor of Law and History at the University of Western Ontario. His research focuses on the history of modern law and society in England and the United States. His first book, Law and English Railway Capitalism 1825-1875, was awarded the Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association in 1995.
Content
INTRODUCTION ; 1. 'The Country of Law': Reconstructing the Morant Bay Uprising in England ; 2. 'The Blood that Testifies': The Jamaica Controversy in Jamaica ; 3. The Drawing-Room Men: The Jamaica Controversy in 1866 ; 4. The Tenets of Terror: Reinventing the Law of Martial Law ; 5. Marshalling Martial Law: Litigating the Jamaica Controversy ; 6. 'The Alphabet of Our Liberty': Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in the Old Bailey ; 7. 'The Most Law-Loving People in the World': The Denouement of the Jamaica Litigation ; EPILOGUE ; Phillips v. Eyre and the Problem of Martial Law ; CONCLUSION ; A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law ; APPENDIX ; The Jamaica Controversy as Historiography ; BIBLIOGRAPHY