Habeas Corpus
eBook - PDF

Habeas Corpus

From England to Empire

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Habeas Corpus

From England to Empire

About this book

We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device.

In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"—these are modern idioms—but the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law.

Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guantánamo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

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Yes, you can access Habeas Corpus by Paul D. Halliday in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & British History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. A Note on the Text
  8. Introduction: Hearing the Sighs of Prisoners
  9. Part I. Making Habeas Corpus
  10. Part II. Using Habeas Corpus
  11. Part III. Habeas Corpus, Bound and Unbound
  12. Appendix: A Survey of Habeas Corpus Use, 1500–1800
  13. Notes
  14. Manuscript Sources
  15. Table of Cases
  16. Table of Statutes
  17. Index