Law

How are residents of South Africa's townships responding to socio-economic inequality and a pervasive sense that the country's democratic transition has not delivered on its constitutional promises of social justice?


Based on extensive fieldwork, this book challenges beliefs that the agency of township residents is limited to waiting for handouts or demanding delivery from the state, showing how they are instead assisting themselves by taking advantage of the opportunities, menyetla, available. In the kasi, or urban townships, where almost half of the urban population lives, there is limited state-enforced order; while the lex constitutional may be the law of the land, the lex lokasi governs day-to-day life in the township. The book opens with a description of life in townships and the interconnected crises facing the country before examining commonly practiced township menyetla to illustrate how the lex lokasi operates: stealing electricity, informal charges to access the Social Relief of Distress grant, fare evasion on the Metrorail, the illicit sale of alcohol during COVID-19 prohibition, medical aid scams, and looting.

Exploring how this looting from below protects those looting from above, it provides a different perspective to the view that state capture is the primary cause of the country's current entropic trajectory and that the application of the much-vaunted constitution can bring South Africa back on track.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Published by Boydell & Brewer Inc.

Legal documents from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Lincolnshire provide fascinating insights into life at the time.

The legal system in eighteenth-century England has generally been viewed as an instrument of class justice, imposed by magistrates drawn from the gentry and aristocracy, and weighing harshly on the labouring and servant classes. The rare survival of the justicing notebooks of Thomas Dixon of Riby, as a working farmer an unusual recruit to the magistrates' bench, make it possible to draw a more nuanced picture. The only Lincolnshire magistrate to leave records of his work "out of sessions", his books detail those cases he heard and resolved alone, often "in my house at Riby", between his appointment in 1787 and his death in 1798; they provide an illuminating glimpse of the justice system in operation at its lowest level, where stealers of ducks and absconding servants were brought before a country justice - and reveal procedures frequently not found in other published accounts. The detail furnished by thesevolumes is amplified with extracts from other records, including those of quarter sessions and parish constables. Edited by B. J. Davey.
The second part of the volume presents papers from an arbitration of 1838 between the licensee of a remote beer house ("The Blackamoor's Head") and the son of the local squire, with the former pressing the latter for repayment of a debt. The near-verbatim evidence describes the behaviour of the "bankers" - the localterm for navvies - engaged in deepening the adjoining river. The inn also provided hospitality to drovers who stopped overnight with their beasts en route from Scotland, and their bills provide rare quantitative evidence of the final years of this trade. Edited by R. C Wheeler.

B.J. Davey taught History at the Immingham School and the University of Lincoln; R. C. Wheeler has written widely on cartographic and local history.

A new approach to the telling of legal history, devoid of jargon and replete with good stories, which will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the common law - the spinal cord of the English body politic.

Throughout English history the rule of law and the preservation of liberty have been inseparable, and both are intrinsic to England's constitution. This accessible and entertaining history traces the growth of the law from its beginnings in Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. It shows how the law evolved from a means of ensuring order and limiting feuds to become a supremely sophisticated dispenser of justice and the primary guardian of civil liberties.This development owed much to the English kings and their judiciary, who, in the twelfth century, forged a unified system of law - predating that of any other European country - from almost wholly Anglo-Saxon elements. Yet by theseventeenth century this royal offspring - Oedipus Lex it could be called - was capable of regicide. Since then the law has had a somewhat fractious relationship with that institution upon which the regal mantle of supreme power descended, Parliament.
This book tells the story of the common law not merely by describing major developments but by concentrating on prominent personalities and decisive cases relating to the constitution, criminal jurisprudence, and civil liberties. It investigates the great constitutional conflicts, the rise of advocacy, and curious and important cases relating to slavery, insanity, obscenity, cannibalism, the death penalty, and miscarriages of justice. The book concludes by examining the extension of the law into the prosecution of war criminals and protection of universal human rights and the threats posed by over-reaction to national emergencies and terrorism. Devoid ofjargon and replete with good stories, Law, Liberty and the Constitution represents a new approach to the telling of legal history and will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about the common law - the spinal cordof the English body politic.

Harry Potter is a former fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge and a practising barrister specialising in criminal defence. He has authored books on the death penalty and Scottish history andwrote and presented an award-winning series on the history of the common law for the BBC.

The first comprehensive biography of arguably the most important political thinker of fifteenth-century England.

Sir John Fortescue was arguably the most important political thinker of fifteenth-century England. Rising from relative obscurity to become Chief Justice of the King's Bench he progressively assumed a political role as a partisanof the Lancastrian cause during the Wars of the Roses. As Chancellor-in-exile to Henry VI he wrote on the lawful succession and in praise of the common law of England. Ultimately making his peace with the Yorkists in 1471, he presented Edward IV with The Governance of England, a treatise that set the tone for debates about the extent of royal and parliamentary power for centuries to come. Demonstrating how England's traditional laws, customs and parliament could ensure that monarchs safeguarded the rights and property of their subjects, his views on these institutions continue to resonate with contemporary debates about England's relationship with Europe and the definition of national identity.
This book provides the first comprehensive biography of Fortescue. It reassesses his career and thought, challenging earlier views about his life, and discusses his work as a lawyer and political thinkerin the light of modern scholarship.

MARGARET KEKEWICH is a former Senior Lecturer in History at the Open University.

Fresh approaches to how premodern women were viewed in legal terms, demonstrating how this varied from country to country and across the centuries.

There has been a tendency in scholarship on premodern women and the law to see married women as hidden from view, obscured by their husbands in legal records. This volume provides a corrective view, arguing that the extent to which the legal principle of coverture applied has been over-emphasized. In particular, it points up differences between the English common law position, which gave husbands guardianship over their wives and their wives' property, and the position elsewhere in northwest Europe, where wives' property became part of a community of property. Detailed studies of legal material from medieval and early modern England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Ghent, Sweden,Norway and Germany enable a better sense of how, when, and where the legal principle of coverture was applied and what effect this had on the lives of married women. Key threads running through the book are married women'srights regarding the possession of moveable and immovable property, marital property at the dissolution of marriage, married women's capacity to act as agents of their husbands and households in transacting business, and married women's interactions with the courts.

Cordelia Beattie is Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh; Matthew Frank Stevens is Lecturer in Medieval History at Swansea University

Contributors: Lars Ivar Hansen, Shennan Hutton, Lizabeth Johnson, Gillian Kenny, Mia Korpiola, Miriam Muller, S.C. Ogilvie, Alexandra Shepard, Cathryn Spence.

Highly topical collection of innovative essays on the protection of democracy by eminent contributors from the judiciary, the practicing legal profession, the academy, and the realm of journalism.


With international safeguards for democracy showing signs of fragility as they come under various forms of attack, the vitality of the legal imagination will be essential to the future of the democratic rule of law. This collection of essays undertakes an innovative and timely assessment of the legal system's capacity for self-renewal. In its focus on law as a creative project in the service of democracy, the volume honors Alfred C. Aman Jr., a distinguished law professor, administrator, jazz musician, and scholar. Aman's extensive body of work includes farsighted, and ultimately optimistic, writings drawing attention to the potential of law reform as a means of addressing democracy deficits in the United States.

This book provides a timely, even urgent, analysis of current challenges to democracy, tackling questions of Constitutional interpretation, separation of Church and State, press freedom, personhood, admissibility of evidence, environmental protection, and legal education, among other issues. Beyond current problems, authors consider resources for renewal in unexpected places, for example, looking to mentorship in legal education as support for democratic imagination and to processes of interpretation, improvisation, and generative dissonance as exemplified in music in ways that are relevant to law. The essays relate to the United States and other jurisdictions that, like the US, have fought hard for their freedoms and democracy through law.

Edited by Yvonne Cripps. Contributors: Nathan D. Alder, Dan Cole, Lloyd Green, Carol Greenhouse, David Hamilton, Jay Krishnan, Tzu-Yi Lin, Christiana Ochoa, Aviva Orenstein, Arantxa Recarte, Lauren Robel, Landyn Rookard, Susan Williams, Elisabeth Zoller.

This book will be made Open Access (license CC BY-NC-ND) within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/.

A key book about rights, separation of powers and the State, which assesses a decade and a half of transformative constitutionalism in Kenya through the lens of landmark constitutional judgments, discussing their international import and suggesting new pathways towards democratic constitutionalism.


In 2010, after more than two decades of struggle, Kenya's new Constitution was born. Widely accepted to be "transformative" in nature, in the decade and a half since it was enacted, the Constitution has been at the centre of national discourse. And in that time, the country's courts have been confronted with crucial and high-stakes constitutional disputes, which are both distinctively Kenyan in nature, but also, are disputes that have long been common to constitutional democracies around the world: they include issues around constitutional change, federalism, imperial presidencies, the role of the legislature, election disputes, land rights, and horizontality, among others. Drawing comparisons with constitutional jurisdictions globally, which often rely upon precedent from each other's jurisdictions, this book examines transformative constitutionalism under the 2010 Constitution, and shows that while Kenyan courts have been informed by - and been in conversation with - global precedent, they have crafted unique and particular solutions.


The book excavates the engagement of Kenyan Courts with the 2010 Kenyan Constitution to highlight the unique and innovative contributions that Kenyan courts have made to global constitutional problems and to suggest pathways for the future. Showcasing the jurisprudence of the courts in action, this book discusses how and when the power to amend a constitution can be limited or constrained and how constitutional change can be insulated from political interference. It examines issues of parliamentarianism and devolution in the context of the national controversy around constituency development funds, and reveals how Kenya provides a model for understanding constitutional separation of powers. It looks at the process for challenging presidential elections, and details how the Supreme Court has aimed to set out clear legal and evidentiary standards for how a court ought to deal with a pure political dispute - something with which judiciaries around the world have struggled. It explores the evolution of socio-economic rights, including the right to housing, non-discrimination, and equality before the law, as well as the question of how transformative constitutionalism interrogates private power. Placing contemporary Kenyan constitutionalism at its heart, this work of comparative constitutional law asks what the ongoing, global constitutional conversation can learn from the Kenyan experience under its new order.

An exceptional study of private peace pacts in early modern Italy that challenges earlier notions of the place of these private agreements in the development of the courts and state.


Private settlements were among the most prominent yet least conspicuous aspects of justice in early modern Europe. Traditionally seen as incompatible with our notions of judicial modernity, these settlements reflected a deeply ingrained culture of negotiation and transaction-one that often viewed resolution by litigation with extreme scepticism. However, rather than existing in opposition to sovereign justice, this practice of private settlement coexisted with the implacable authority of rulers who alternated between exemplary punishments and royal pardons to maintain social harmony.

In this English translation of his seminal study, Governare l'odio. Pace e giustizia criminale nell'Italia moderna (secoli XVI-XVII), Paolo Broggio shows how private settlements were far from being a purely benevolent mechanism of reconciliation, often carrying unsettling similarities to institutional coercion and even acts of revenge. Judicial authorities are revealed as not only tolerating these private agreements but shown to have actively facilitated and manipulated them as a means of exerting their control within a community. Religious justifications further lent these agreements a veneer of moral obligation, masking the underlying pressures at play. Through detailed examples such as proceedings in the Papal States, Broggio explores how courts encouraged settlements not only to manage caseloads but to also reinforce existing social hierarchies and power structures.

This expansive study re-examines the role of peace settlements in early modern justice, revealing them as a fundamental yet coercive tool of governance rather than a simple, private, alternative to judicial authority.