Associate Professor (2000)

Early Modern Britain and the Empire; Legal History

Office Hours: Tues. and Wed., 1:30-3:15 (Fall '09)

Office: 116 Randall Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6385

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: ph4pvirginia.edu

Education

BA, Wesleyan University, 1983
MA, University of Chicago, 1988
PhD, University of Chicago, 1993

Current Research

I first became interested in how law accommodates new political ideas and social practices while writing my first book, concerned with the origins of partisan politics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Since then, I have moved further into law’s history, though I continue to explore developments in law by seeing them in the rich contexts of religious belief, political turmoil, imperial expansion, and other forces that made the early modern world.

I have recently completed a new book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire. From a survey of the writ files and rolls of the court of King’s Bench—little studied before—I have gathered information on more than 4500 prisoners from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. The book also relies on manuscript case reports and non-legal sources ranging from letters to sermons. Using these materials, I explore how this vital legal instrument arose from royal power, not against it. Because the writ was concerned with ensuring that the king’s laws were rightly used, judges who issued the writ focused more on the wrongs of jailers than on the rights of prisoners. By making the judge sovereign, the writ of habeas corpus protected, and ultimately transformed, ideas about the many kinds of liberty claimed by English people and by others who used the writ in England, Quebec, India, and beyond. Habeas corpus thus gave individual prisoners, in England and across the empire, new capacities 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."

Courses

HIEU 211: History of England, to 1688
HIEU 329: Seventeenth-Century Britain: Politics in Thought and Action
HIEU 355: History of English Law, to 1776
HIEU 401: Crime and Punishment in Early Modern England
HIEU 726: Graduate Colloquium on Early Modern English History
HIST 824: Law: Transnational and Imperial Contexts, to 1850

Graduate Advising

Though my research concerns law and its social and cultural contexts in England and the empire, I am eager to help graduate students develop their own intellectual enterprises. My graduate students have conducted research on a wide range of topics, from religious history in the sixteenth century to transatlantic cultural history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some have crossed disciplinary boundaries, working in literature and mathematics as well as in history and law. Many graduate students studying early modern England have developed broad-ranging research with the help of colleagues in European, Latin American, African, and early American history, and in other departments too, from Religious Studies to Spanish. I encourage those considering graduate study here to visit the website of our Early Modern World program: http://www.virginia.edu/history/programs/EarlyModern/index.php.

Principal Publications and Awards

Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Harvard University Press, forthcoming, 2010)

Co-author, with G. Edward White, “The Suspension Clause: English Text, Imperial Contexts, and American Implications,” 94 Virginia Law Review (May, 2008) 575: http://www.virginialawreview.org/articles.php?article=219

Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback, 2003): http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521552530 

Biographical articles on leading law officers, judges, and urban leaders of the seventeenth century for the Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)

“‘A Clashing of Jurisdictions:’ Commissions of Association in Restoration Corporations,” Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 425-55

American Council of Learned Societies, Burkhardt Fellowship, 2006-07

National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship, 2005-06

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellow, 1992-93

Jacob K. Javits Fellow, 1987-91