Law, History, Text - Writing Ironic Legal Histories

This book presents a fresh approach to the writing of legal history as an essentially textual enterprise. It argues that to write any history is to tell a story. In doing so, it appreciates the place, not just of context and contingency in the history of law, but also humanity. Law is a human creation, for which reason it accommodates both reason and romance. Absent sensibility, it makes no sense. This book accordingly tells four stories about law. A first revisits a familiar institution, the English monarchy. A second reads history through the lens of a particular author, Daniel Defoe.A third writes a history of a few hundred yards of Bristol, eighteenth century England's premier slave-port. A fourth investigates a peculiar, and hideous, fantasy. Engaging texts drawn from literature, philosophy and politics, as well as law, this work will appeal to any scholar or student interested not just in the past of law, but in its imagining and inscription.

List of contents

Introduction: Irony, Anecdote and Fashion; 1. The Stuff of Dreams; 2. Novel Judgments; 3. Two Days in Bristol; 4.The Laws of Witchery

About the author

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, UK.

Product details

• Authors: Ian Ward
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 05.03.2026
• EAN: 9781032746562
• ISBN: 978-1-0-3274656-2
• No. of pages: 260
• Series: Transforming Legal Histories
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; History, LAW / General, LAW / Legal History, LAW / Jurisprudence, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Historical Events, Legal History, Literary studies: general, Social Law, Law & society, Law and society, sociology of law, Jurisprudence & Philosophy Of Law, Methods, theory and philosophy of law, Social law and Medical law