Paul D. Halliday

Halliday’s book tests the traditional image of habeas corpus as a defense of personal freedom from royal abuse against the reality to be found in a sampling of cases over four centuries (1500 to 1800). He finds that the writ originated as a way for the highest royal judges to supervise inferior ones, especially justices of the peace. In the hands of some activist judges like Holt and Mansfield, it expanded from ensuring that conventional imprisonments were justified to intervening in cases of wives and daughters held by husbands or fathers, of impressed seamen in the navy, of slaves (mostly famously Somerset), and even prisoners of war and alleged spies and enemy aliens. This expansion (chiefly from 1680 to 1777) was later cut back by repeated suspensions of the writ during the American and French Revolutions and later colonial conflicts from the Maori to the Maumau. Unfortunately, Halliday chose to tell this story thematically rather than chronologically, leading to a great deal of repetition. Despite this organizational flaw, the book contains much valuable new data and important challenges to conventional scholarly beliefs about the development of this “palladium of liberty.”… (altro)