Awards
- Nominated for James Willard Hurst Prize 2011
- Nominated for Leo Gershoy Award 2010
- Nominated for Morris D. Forkosch Prize 2010
- Nominated for Pulitzer Prizes 2011
Overview
"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."
Full Product Details
Author: Paul D. Halliday
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: The Belknap Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.50cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.666kg
ISBN: 9780674064201
ISBN 10: 0674064208
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 02 April 2012
Audience:
General/trade
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Halliday constructs an exhaustive and informative legal history of the English writ of habeas corpus from the 16th century to the present...Halliday provides an expertly developed analysis which draws multiple interesting connections between the writ of habeas corpus and sources of English law, many of which are connected to the U.S. Constitution...This book is highly recommended for...individuals who are seriously interested in this component of legal history.--Steven Puro Library Journal (02/15/2010)
Author Information
Paul D. Halliday is Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
