Law, History, Text

Writing Ironic Legal Histories
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-74656-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 244 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Transforming Legal Histories

This book presents a fresh approach to the writing of legal history as an essentially textual enterprise. It argues that to write any history is to tell a story. In doing so, it appreciates the place not just of context and contingency in the history of law but also of humanity. Law is a human creation, for which reason it accommodates both reason and romance. Absent sensibility, it makes no sense. This book accordingly tells four stories about law. A first revisits a familiar institution, the English monarchy. A second reads history through the lens of a particular author, Daniel Defoe. A third writes a history of a few hundred yards of Bristol, eighteenth-century England’s premier slave-port. A fourth investigates a peculiar, and hideous, fantasy. Engaging texts drawn from literature, philosophy, and politics, as well as law, this work will appeal to any scholar or student interested not just in the past of law but also in its imagining and inscription.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ward, Ian

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Irony, Anecdote, and Fashion; 1. The Stuff of Dreams; 2. Novel Judgements; 3. Two Days in Bristol; 4.The Laws of Witchery

Über Autor(innen)

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, UK.