The diverse system of provincial city coinage saw the appearance of many personal names, including those of women, and the coinage was controlled mostly by the city elites.

The peculiar purpose and population of the Australian penal colonies presented a raft of problems for the administration of justice and the maintenance of discipline. There was a perceived need for a simplified and more coercive system of law, which however coincided with a desire that local law and justice be fairly applied and keep pace with metropolitan legal reforms. That bred numerous tensions and confusions. This chapter considers how the need to control convict populations in colonial New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land invited a myriad of compromises and peculiarities, including a chaotic application of English transportation law and the assumption of vast and informal powers by colonial magistrates. Although there was a broad shift over time towards the normalising of colonial justice and discipline, the imperial and local governments were slow to correct local informalities, injustices, and deviations from metropolitan law and practice.

Norms and regulations within the Greek polis provided a legal framework not only for the different markets and the support of economic activities, but also for the resolution of disputes arising between the private persons as well as magistrates. Whenever humans interacted within the economical sphere, conflicts could easily arise . Be they over the ownership of land or products, the transaction of goods and labour, or levies and taxes, in order to maintain good order they had to be resolved peacefully and without personal violence. Thus, the judicial structures and procedural principles of dispute resolution in the economic sphere of the Greek city as conveyed in literary, epigraphic, and papyrological sources are represented.

This chapter examines an apparent paradox, the existence and further development of significant body of laws prohibiting different forms of gambling and gambling in certain places, and their overwhelming inefficacy. The law provides, nevertheless, a very useful prism through which to plot changing and fluctuating attitudes towards gambling among the authorities and politically powerful, and, indeed, rather lower down in society. The heart of this chapter is an analysis of successive drives to clamp down on gaming houses in London and their fairly negligible impact viewed in the longer term. This is partly a story of the resourcefulness and resources of the gaming house keepers, and their ability to evade or blunt the effects of law and magisterial campaigns to enforce the law. But it is also a story of how ineffective the law and contemporary forms of policing were when faced with an extensive, well-embedded and well-capitalized gambling industry, often supported by or at least tolerated by local communities. This is quite apart from the flagrant double standards which were entertained by the state and Parliament towards gambling.

The Prologue introduces the fundamental concepts of the book (antislavery, abolition, judicial forum), and Colombia’s ambiguous manumission law of 1821. Colombian leaders embraced a politics of antislavery by criticizing the Atlantic slave system and Spanish colonialism as a form of political slavery, but their efforts to speed the coming of a world with no slavery were lukewarm. They took the gradual emancipation approach, leaving most slaves in captivity, upholding the property rights of masters, and offering no citizenship to slaves and most former slaves. By contrast, some slaves and a few magistrates developed radical antislavery positions, calling for the unconditional end of slavery. However, antislavery and anti-Spanish politics had overlapping legal origins and tensions that emerged in the political exchanges and debates that transpired during litigation. In this judicial forum – a space of antislavery and abolition in a society with no freedom of the press or association – many slaves articulated their vision of a peaceful and complete end of slavery. They hoped to become law-abiding, God-fearing vassals of the king and, later on, citizens of the early republics.

Many countries around the globe rely on ordinary citizens, untrained in the law, to decide the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens. Some countries use all-layperson juries, while others use mixed tribunals or mixed courts in which professional judges and lay citizens work together to decide a case. Still other countries use lay magistrates or lay judges working alone or on panels. This book provides a view of the different forms of lay participation and the ways in which they are evolving. It offers a comprehensive picture of how some countries have made recent and remarkable advances toward lay decision-making, while others have a long-standing form of lay participation that is well accepted in that country. Still other countries have faced challenges with lay participation and have opted for limiting the scope of lay legal decision-making or even abolishing it. The organization of this book illustrates that lay participation in a country is not fixed in stone; lay participation is being advanced, reinforced, or replaced in countries around the world. These shifting responses to lay participation suggest the prime importance of stepping back and taking a global perspective.

In the decades prior to the First World War, the relationship between policing, adjudication, and punishment was continually being redefined not only for those who were its targets, but for its wielders as well. Police authority in the courtroom, though strengthened by expertise and training, was hardly uncontested. Magistrates and police constables were under constant public supervision, and the former were keen to avoid the widespread hostility expressed towards the latter in working-class communities. Regardless of the increasing intrusion of policing into everyday life, it lay in a magistrate’s hands to decide if any given defendant deserved leniency or severity and which laws merited rigorous enforcement. Magistrates and journalists challenged the reputation of constables, while defendants opted for summary jurisdiction of indictable offenses or guilty pleas to mediate the consequences of arrest and prosecution. Through these and other practices, local courtrooms proved crucial in reshaping the legal and social consequences of police prosecutions in this period. The concluding portion of this chapter briefly analyses the social composition of the London magistracy and how they grounded their claims to moral authority in the courtroom.

Chapter 3 focuses on the social property relations of each case building on the Political Marxist tradition and by engaging with international legal history. This chapter presents the major institutions, actors, and jurisdictional disputes that provide bases to understand, first, the local specificities of the Castilian kingdom and its American colonies, emphasising the broader Iberian fragmented assemblage and the role of theologians in the particular politico-religious form of empire linked to principles of morality and law. In France, the focus is on Louis XIV and his ministers trying to contain the various jurisdictional regimes and conceptions of space, as well as legal actors and orders. The role of England’s social property relations is discussed in relation to the common law and to enclosures in primitive accumulation and the transition to capitalism. Finally, the Dutch Republic highlights the problem of transition and the specific jurisdictional context of its confederation, as well as the role of merchants and magistrates in shaping its politics. The chapter describes practices that could be considered as extensions rather than transports or transplants of authority.

Chapter 6 uses the fictional working-class Jemima’s account of the poor laws and the laws of settlement and removal to discuss a series of cases involving poor and pauper women in interaction with the law. Material is drawn from magistrates’ proceedings and from the records of the court of King’s Bench, where some of the cases, including that of the slave servant Charlotte Howe, were sent on appeal. The judges’ (including William Blackstone and chief justice Mansfield) attitudes towards the poor laws are discussed.

The ‘ziggy shape’ comes from Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘History’, which is explored throughout the chapter. It engages with Penelope Corfield’s Time and the Shape of History. It sets out the troubles that historians have had in writing about law experience in the past. Using Laurence Sterne’s account of writing history in Tristram Shandy, Chapter 2 explores the narrative shape of history and of the law. The chapter also explores Sterne’s own experience of the law in eighteenth-century Yorkshire.