Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Law & Humanities Workshop Series
presents
Paul Halliday
University of Virginia
Judicial Authority as Community Project: An Eighteenth-Century Clerk's-Eye View
Friday, April 1, 2011
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
This is an essay in method. Print sources of early modern legal life are seductively easy to use. But extensive scholarship has revealed the many inadequacies of print sources of law. I respond to this problem by suggesting why and how we must work in court archives. While this is a commonplace among legal historians, I want to explore how the problem and its solution might carry us into cultural as well as legal history. Here, we follow insights from the recent historiography of science and epistemological communities; of the ways in which speech, manuscript, and print interacted as forms of knowledge; and of archives as constitutive instruments of the early modern state. I argue that we can mark out early modernity as a distinct epoch according to the ways in which such technologies of the intellect interacted. By exploring one court case - Cowles case, in Kings Bench, in 1759 - we can watch this interaction; we can go into the archives to see how court clerks helped to make what counted as legal authority. We find that authority was made more by communities than individuals; that it arose from and ran through manuscript more than print; and that authority was stored in, and thus made by, the archives constructed and maintained by court clerks. We can see this by looking closely at material objects that contained authority: in this instance, the rulebooks of Kings Bench. Operating at this level of detail with sensitivity to the material culture of law and the sensory world in which it worked is the only way historians and judges today can place their own claims about authority on solid foundations.
Paul Halliday is professor of history at the University of Virginia. He teaches and writes about the legal history of Britain and its empire from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. He is the author of Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge University Press), which explores the rise of partisan political practice and law's response to it. His book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Harvard University Press), appeared last year. Halliday studied at Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago. He moved to Virginia in 2000, after teaching at Bowdoin, Harvard, and Union Colleges. At the moment, he is working on two projects: one exploring the archival and other material forms of judicial authority in the eighteenth century, and the other concerned with the formation of the imperial constitution, and in particular, with the judicial role in making the constitutions of dominions from the Caribbean to Mauritius and beyond.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
