Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire [Paperback]

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 worlds most revered legal device.

In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the kings subjects. The key was not the prisoners right to libertythese are modern idiomsbut 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 writs history and of English law.

Hallidays work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guant?namo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.

Halliday's magisterial revisionist history is as impressive as it is indispensable.In clear, at times compelling, prose Halliday offers an outstanding work of historical and legal scholarship. I am unaware of any treatment of habeas corpus which covers so broad a canvas or rests upon such massive archival foundations. Halliday has convincingly demolished the traditional myth of habeas corpus. One might even say that the conceptual sophistication, evidential weight, and span of this book point towards a new way of doing constitutional history.A remarkable work, based on truly heroic research. Halliday explains why liberty in the EngllsÉ