The barristers were the most powerful and prosperous professional group in early modern England. This book systematically examines the barrister's working life during a half-century of rapid growth and structural change within the legal profession. Prest analyzes patterns of professional recruitment, training, and mobility and explores the participation of barristers in the cultural, religious, and political life of Elizabethan and early Stuart England. This is the first book to be published in the Oxford Studies in Social History, under the general editorship of Keith Thomas. The series, which will cover all periods and parts of the world, will include original works of scholarship on a broad range of subjects of interest to historians as well as to scholars working in related fields.

The number of practitioners appearing before international courts, tribunals, and arbitral panels has risen sharply in the last decade, prompting concerns over ethics and best practice standards. This book assesses these issues, and argues that common ethical standards will be key to maintaining the integrity of the international judicial system.

Since Ian Watt's Rise of the Novel, the history of prose fiction has privileged the courtship plot. Kelly Hager proposes an equally powerful but overlooked narrative focusing on the failed marriage. Hager's alternative history is richly contextualized in the legal history of marriage and divorce, enabling her to offer a fuller account of competing strands of the Woman Question and revisionist readings of Dickens's novels.

The specially commissioned papers in this book lay a solid theoretical foundation for comparative legal history as a distinct academic discipline. While facilitating a much needed dialogue between comparatists and legal historians, this research handbook examines methodologies in this emerging field and reconsiders legal concepts and institutions like custom, civil procedure, and codification from a comparative legal history perspective.

The Sunday Times number one bestseller. Winner of the Books are My Bag Non-Fiction Award. Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year. Shortlisted for Specsavers Non-Fiction Book of the Year. You may not wish to think about it, but one day you or someone you love will almost certainly appear in a criminal courtroom. You might be a juror, a victim, a witness or – perhaps through no fault of your own – a defendant. Whatever your role, you’d expect a fair trial. I’m a barrister. I work in the criminal justice system, and every day I see how fairness is not guaranteed. Too often the system fails those it is meant to protect. The innocent are wronged and the guilty allowed to walk free. In The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken I want to share some stories from my daily life to show you how the system is broken, who broke it and why we should start caring before it’s too late. A Sunday Times top ten bestseller for twenty-four weeks. ‘Eye-opening, funny and horrifying’ – Observer ‘Everyone who has any interest in public life should read it’ – Daily Mail

This new volume originated in a collective project aimed at developing an alternative theoretical approach to the market monopoly theory that currently dominates studies of the legal professions. In contrast to theories linking the rise of professionalism to the development of economic liberalism, this book advances a political theory of lawyers' collective action. The contributors focus on areas where the engagement of lawyers has shaped the core of liberal politics; these papers can only enrich our understanding of the political importance of lawyers.

This companion addresses the history of crime and punishment through entries by expert contributors that select and define the central vocabulary and terminology for the study of the history of crime and punishment. Organized alphabetically, with useful cross-references and bibliographies, it goes beyond mere definitions to offer rigorous critical analysis of the terms and their use within the field, both now and in the past. It will be essential to students, researchers, and teachers in the field.

The book is the first full analysis of the gentry in the early modern period since G.E.Mingay The Gentry: the Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (1976). It offers a synthesis of the recent specialist work on this key social and political group, but will also provide a distinctive approach to its subjects through the use of the texts and artefacts by which the gentry sought to fashion themselves.