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Book Review
| Norma Landau, ed., Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 264. $60.00 (ISBN 0-521-6461-2).
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| This impressive collection of essays is the second Festschrift for John Beattie, University Professor Emeritus of History and Criminology at the University of Toronto. The first (Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May, and Simon Devereaux, eds., Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New [Toronto, 1998]) was assembled by several of Beattie's recent doctoral students, who have already begun to make important contributions to the history of English criminal justice administration in their own right. This second volume contains essays by ten leading international scholars in the field, some of whom studied with Beattie as undergraduate or graduate students in earlier decades. |
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Several of the contributors to Law, Crime and English Society, 1660–1830 touch on themes explored by Beattie in his two monumental works on English criminal justice administration, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986) and Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), and in his other published works. Thus, Randall McGowen and Joanna Innes (writing on forgery and factory legislation, respectively) assess parliamentary contributions to penal and social policy; Peter King and Nicholas Rogers examine the relationship between criminal proceedings and the manpower demands of warfare; and Douglas Hay and Norma Landau discuss the activities of rural justices and urban magistrates. Other scholars venture further afield: Ruth Paley reassesses the legal legacy of the Somerset decision; David Lieberman analyzes Blackstone's efforts to bring conceptual clarity to the realms of private and public law; Donna Andrew sheds light on the use of published apologies in resolving interpersonal disputes; and Barbara Shapiro reveals how legal conceptions of "fact" provided support for contemporary theological arguments. The volume includes an introduction by Landau that situates Beattie's scholarship within its historiographical context and a compilation of Beattie's publications. |
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The richness of the approaches, arguments, and source materials arrayed in this volume defies concise summary. However, one prominent and recurring theme addressed by several essayists concerns the role of English magistrates and their relationship to the central government. In a provocative essay, Hay argues that magistrates, especially in rural areas, enjoyed "enormous discretion" (20) that was seldom checked by the high courts. According to Hay, litigation costs and judicial "tolerance for ignorant or mistaken, but also abusive and even clearly malicious, conduct" by magistrates (21) deterred persons with legitimate grievances from seeking relief from magisterial decisions. In Hay's view, "the high law of King's Bench effectively protected the low law of most provincial justices from being questioned, curbed, or controlled by those whom they judged" (45). |
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On the other hand, several contributors suggest that English magistrates operated within legal, professional, and ideological contexts that moderated their discretion and affected their attitudes to both the poor and the central government. In an ambitious reconstruction of the murky world of London-area "trading justices," Landau reveals that magistrates in Middlesex and Westminster engaged in "self-regulation" through admonitions, internal hearings, and "representations" of misbehaving JPs to the Lord Chancellor (62). For her part, Innes indicates that certain magistrates in the late eighteenth century were actually encouraged by decisions in the King's Bench to advance the cause of parish apprentices and to "exercise independent judgment about the merits" of cases involving such individuals (241). And Rogers, in a remarkable essay that relies on archival materials from the Admiralty, reveals that "[l]ocal magistrates sometimes dragged their feet in backing warrants" sought by press gangs (79), thus frustrating the desires of the central government. |
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In an era styled "the golden age of discretionary justice" (Peter King, Crime, Justice, and Discretion in England, 1740–1820 [Oxford, 2000], 1), two other factors also affected magisterial discretion: statutes and lawyers. First, as Hay might well have noted, Parliament routinely passed statutes during the eighteenth century that expanded summary jurisdiction but denied persons convicted summarily the ability to seek review of their convictions in King's Bench by way of the writ of certiorari. Thus, the infrequency of appeals of summary convictions to King's Bench resulted not only from high litigation costs or pessimistic predictions about the probable decisions of high court judges, who Hay concedes could be "demanding" of JPs (25), but also from statutory restrictions. On the other hand, as King suggests, Parliament, over time, also came to place "stricter statutory control" on magistrates (115), a development most clearly reflected by Parliament's heightened regulation of pretrial and summary hearings in Sir John Jervis's Acts of 1848. |
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Second, as King correctly notes, "greater lawyerly involvement" (115) in magistrates' proceedings also helped cabin magisterial discretion. Although Hay down-plays the role of litigation and lawyers, persons convicted summarily did occasionally appeal their convictions to the quarter sessions or petition the Home Office for relief and increasingly did so with the assistance of lawyers. Although such challenges were rare, they likely also worked to limit the discretion of individual magistrates. |
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This wide-ranging, stimulating, and meticulously edited volume should be of profound interest to scholars of English criminal justice administration, social relations, and governance and will surely spark further scholarship and debate. The essays demonstrate the dynamic, complex, and contested nature of criminal justice administration during England's "long eighteenth century." As such, they are a fitting testament to John Beattie's immense professional and personal legacy. |
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| Bruce P. Smith
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| University of Illinois College of Law |
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