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 Guantanamo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

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9780674049017

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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 20100215 [A] superb history of habeas corpus...Part legal drama, part subtle causal analysis, this book proves that a gripping history of a legal writ is no contradiction in terms...[A] lucid and learned account. -- Adrian Vermeule New Republic online 20100301 In what was a heroic research quest, Mr. Halliday has undertaken a needed and timely reexamination of what some call the great writ of liberty --the writ of habeas corpus--and concludes that its basic purpose is about who gets to exercise power and not at all about individual rights as most of us quite wrongly think...This book of meticulous history is as fresh as today's headlines and should be required reading for anyone concerned about our rights and our security. -- James Srodes Washington Times 20100329 [Halliday] challenges the way that most chroniclers go about drafting constitutional history...In order to better understand the history of the Great Writ, he went beyond the well-known commentaries of Blackstone and his countryman Edward Coke and turned to thousands of unopened parchment documents, concerning more than eleven thousand habeas cases from 1500 to 1800, from London's National Archives...And as he worked through the documents, he discovered that they tell a very different story than the lofty historical writing about the writ might suggest...If habeas corpus is a tool of judicial power, its greatest enemy is often the elected branches that fear that power, particularly in wartime. That was precisely the rationale that Congress used in passing the Military Commissions Act, which barred more than four hundred detainees at Guantanamo from having access to the writ. When the Supreme Court found that action unconstitutional, it was, in many ways, just one more battle in a centuries-long fight over institutional power...Habeas Corpus is...full of colorful judges, unhappy sailors, and enough estranged wives to make these thousands of dusty old documents come vividly to life. But as a challenge to legal historians and their sacred-cow interpretations of the foundations of personal liberty--and, more essentially, as a methodological revision of the standard historical scholarship on the law--this book will change the landscape altogether. It serves as a critical reminder to the rest of us that even in wartime, at great distances, and across hundreds of years, the best way to judge the facts is to begin by looking at them. -- Dahlia Lithwick Bookforum 20100401 Timely, important and thought-provoking...Eschewing a Whiggish reliance on the triumphalist assertions of well-known legal writers, Halliday uses the often filthy and rumpled writs, return to writs, enrolled copies, court orders and affidavits in the court of King's Bench archives to construct a radically revisionist account of how the writ worked between 1500 and 1800. -- Clare Jackson Literary Review 20100401 [A] monumental work..For anyone deeply interested in these issues it provides an invigorating blast against received ideas and intellectual complacency. Above all, it challenges us to think again about the foundation stones of personal liberty. The Economist 20100417 Not the least merit of Paul Halliday's enthralling and scholarly historical survey, focusing primarily on the years 1500-1800, is to remind us of what could be seen as the glory days of habeas corpus...Halliday's researches not only illuminate the legal history of habeas corpus but also provide fascinating insights into the social history of the period he studies...Halliday's researches yield a rich harvest of human stories which have all the vividness of the common law itself, yet fall into a discernible pattern which he traces with skill and clarity. -- Tom Bingham London Review of Books 20101007 The year's most readable book about English common law came from an American history professor--Habeas Corpus. The legal wonder that Britain bequeathed the world has unlocked prison doors for so many who have been wrongly detained; Paul Halliday tells the story for general readers, and lets the lawyers grub around his copious footnotes if interested in the technicalities. -- Geoffrey Robertson New Statesman 20101122

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 20100215 [A] superb history of habeas corpus...Part legal drama, part subtle causal analysis, this book proves that a gripping history of a legal writ is no contradiction in terms...[A] lucid and learned account. -- Adrian Vermeule New Republic online 20100301 In what was a heroic research quest, Mr. Halliday has undertaken a needed and timely reexamination of what some call the great writ of liberty --the writ of habeas corpus--and concludes that its basic purpose is about who gets to exercise power and not at all about individual rights as most of us quite wrongly think...This book of meticulous history is as fresh as today's headlines and should be required reading for anyone concerned about our rights and our security. -- James Srodes Washington Times 20100329 [Halliday] challenges the way that most chroniclers go about drafting constitutional history...In order to better understand the history of the Great Writ, he went beyond the well-known commentaries of Blackstone and his countryman Edward Coke and turned to thousands of unopened parchment documents, concerning more than eleven thousand habeas cases from 1500 to 1800, from London's National Archives...And as he worked through the documents, he discovered that they tell a very different story than the lofty historical writing about the writ might suggest...If habeas corpus is a tool of judicial power, its greatest enemy is often the elected branches that fear that power, particularly in wartime. That was precisely the rationale that Congress used in passing the Military Commissions Act, which barred more than four hundred detainees at Guantanamo from having access to the writ. When the Supreme Court found that action unconstitutional, it was, in many ways, just one more battle in a centuries-long fight over institutional power...Habeas Corpus is...full of colorful judges, unhappy sailors, and enough estranged wives to make these thousands of dusty old documents come vividly to life. But as a challenge to legal historians and their sacred-cow interpretations of the foundations of personal liberty--and, more essentially, as a methodological revision of the standard historical scholarship on the law--this book will change the landscape altogether. It serves as a critical reminder to the rest of us that even in wartime, at great distances, and across hundreds of years, the best way to judge the facts is to begin by looking at them. -- Dahlia Lithwick Bookforum 20100401 Timely, important and thought-provoking...Eschewing a Whiggish reliance on the triumphalist assertions of well-known legal writers, Halliday uses the often filthy and rumpled writs, return to writs, enrolled copies, court orders and affidavits in the court of King's Bench archives to construct a radically revisionist account of how the writ worked between 1500 and 1800. -- Clare Jackson Literary Review 20100401 [A] monumental work..For anyone deeply interested in these issues it provides an invigorating blast against received ideas and intellectual complacency. Above all, it challenges us to think again about the foundation stones of personal liberty. The Economist 20100417

Author Information

Paul D. Halliday is Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia.

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