Faculty of Law University of Toronto
Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Paul Halliday
University of Virginia, Corcoran Dept. of History
Habeas Corpus in Imperial Perspective
Thursday, March 31, 2011
12:30 – 2:00
Solarium, Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park
Bio:
I first became interested in how law accommodates new ideas and social practices while writing Dismembering the Body Politic, a book concerned with the origins of partisan politics and law's response to it. I have recently published a new book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire. In it, I explore how habeas corpus arose from royal power, not against it. By making the judge sovereign, habeas corpus protected and transformed ideas about the many kinds of liberty claimed by those who used the writ in England, Quebec, India, and beyond. Habeas corpus thus gave people across the empire new ways to shape the exercise of authority. Only legislative action, in Parliament or in colonial assemblies, would hinder the work of judges who used the writ to "hear the sighs of prisoners." I am now working on two projects. The first concerns the material culture of law and the interaction of manuscript, print, and aural forms of knowledge in the eighteenth century. I am especially interested in how court clerks and their archival practices generated what counted as legal authority in English and colonial courts. Related to this, the second project considers imperial constitution making from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and in particular, the role of the judicial office in making the constitutions of dominions from the Caribbean to Mauritius and beyond.
Principal Publications and Awards: Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 2010); co-author, with G. Edward White, “The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications,” 94 Virginia Law Review (May, 2008), 575-714: awarded the Sutherland Prize of the American Society for Legal History, 2009; Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback, 2003); American Council of Learned Societies, Burkhardt Fellowship, 2006-07; National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship, 2005-06.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
