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Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Law

Writing the history of law involves choices: whose stories are to be told, and how? 

Insiders and Outsiders in the History of Law examines the dividing lines drawn in the history of the law and the experiences of those who have fallen within and outside of them across seven centuries of British legal history.


268 pages | 9.21 x 6.14 | © 2026

Reimagining Law and Justice

Law and Legal Studies: Legal History


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Table of Contents

  • 1 Introduction
    Gwen Seabourne and Joanna McCunn

  • 2 Local customs and central powers in the ‘long twelfth century’. England and Italy compared
    Attilio Stella

  • 3 "All those men who are not of the law of Rome": participation and exclusion of non-Latin plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and clerks in the courts of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
    Jennifer Pearce

  • 4 Sir John Vavasour (d. 1506) and the Palatine of Lancaster: lawyer, judge, Northerner
    Ashley Hannay

  • 5 Inside and outside the palace: Henry VIII’s queens at law
    Anthony Musson and Kirsty Wright

  • 6 Miscegenation and racial passing in 1700s colonial Jamaica
    Justine Collins

  • 7 Libellous letters and gender nonconformity: the Chevalier d’Eon in the English law courts, 1763–77
    Daniel F. Gosling

  • 8 Judicial insiders: the Coleridge dynasty
    Philip Handler

  • 9 Law reform in the age of Henry Brougham: A legal biographical interpretation
    Patricia McMahon

  • 10 The jury system of Bristol, 1919–1939
    Kay Crosby

  • 11 Insiders and outsiders in legal history: concluding thoughts
    David Sugarman

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