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This first study of the legal history of sex offences in Mandate Palestine pioneers a new socio-cultural perspective on evidence.
List of contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Legal background; 2. Cultural narratives underlying proof: male-to-male offences; 3. Plausibility of children's testimonies: narrator's identity; 4. Plausibility and ethnicity: audience-narrator nexus; 5. Plausible emotions; 6. Corroboration: plausibility embedded in evidentiary standards; 7. Implausible counter-narratives; Conclusion; List of legal cases; Appendix: relevant criminal legislation; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Orna Alyagon Darr is a Senior Lecturer at the law schools of Sapir Academic College and Ono Academic College. She is the author of Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (2011). Her work explores evidence law, criminal law and criminal procedure in their cultural, social and historical context, and her articles have been published in leading academic journals such as Law and History Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Continuity and Change and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.
Summary
What makes one crime story convincing and another implausible? Evidence law provides only a partial answer. This study explores the meaning of plausibility and the materials from which it is constituted in a particular historical and socio-cultural setting: proving sex offences in Mandate Palestine.
Additional text
'The book will appeal widely to humanists across the disciplines interested in the working of the law as such, or interested in the law as an archive for the study of society.' Ishita Pande, Law & Society Review
