This chapter uses the records of urban policing to recover women’s wrongdoing in relation to affray, bloodshed and moral offences such as prostitution. These offences were reported and punished via presentments made by local officials and offer a wider perspective on women’s misbehaviour and its punishment, encompassing the disruptive use of women’s voices and their use of the hue and cry as a policing mechanism. It argues that no type of disorder was exclusively male or female and that both sexes had the capacity to harm others and the urban community through their unlawful and immoral behaviour. These records illuminate town officials’ use of policing to create and maintain peaceful communities in order to promote their civic status and foster economic prosperity, and together with Chapter 4, this chapter helps to create a more rounded picture of the various ways in which misbehaviour and violence gave rise to different legal actions.

Global legal pluralism is not simply a result of political pluralism, but is instead the expression of deep contradictions between colliding sectors of a global society. It has its origins in contradictions between society-wide institutionalised rationalities, which law cannot solve, but which demand a new legal approach to colliding norms. This chapter develops the thesis with three arguments. (1) The fragmentation of global law is more radical than any single reductionist perspective can comprehend. (2) Any aspirations to a normative unity of global law are thus doomed from the outset. A meta-level at which conflicts might be solved is wholly elusive both in global law and in global society. (3) Legal fragmentation cannot itself be combated. At best, a weak normative compatibility of the fragments might be achieved. However, this is dependent upon the ability of conflict law to establish a specific network logic, which can effect a loose coupling of colliding units.

This chapter assesses the legal power of wives, midwives and mothers in the legal regimes of Anglo-America. Though under coverture, wives clearly had a right to petition the courts to compel neglectful husbands to provide them with financial maintenance. Husbands had a patriarchal responsibility to provide for their wives and children, and magistrates had an interest in holding men accountable to their obligations to care for their families. Laws regarding divorce and marital separation differed by location. In England and the southern colonies, especially the Chesapeake and South Carolina, authorities granted full divorces in very few instances. In the New England colonies, however, magistrates permitted couples who could not live harmoniously together to divorce, an agreement which negated any obligation of the husband to provide for his wife. Remarkably, in cases of illegitimacy in all areas of the Anglo-American world, a man who fathered children out of wedlock still had a patriarchal responsibility to provide financial support to his family. Mothers of these children, often supported by midwives, could legally claim financial support from the men they named as the father of their children, even if the fathers denied the women’s accusations.

This chapter provides an overview of the major arguments in the book and maps out how women’s relationship to the law changed in England and colonial America under different legal jurisdictions. It presents the argument that the law increasingly replaced patriarchy as the governing ideology of family and social relationships. It discusses the opportunities and limitations of using legal records as a source of historical evidence, and assesses how the work contributes to our understanding of women in the early modern period.

This chapter provides the essential context for understanding the workings of town courts and the legal actions that women were involved in. It describes the three towns that are the focus of the book, detailing their political status, populations, local government and other key features. It then discusses the procedures and customs of the courts of these towns, the nature of the legal process, and the records of these courts. Finally, it discusses different approaches to the study of court records, outlining the way that these records have been used in creating this study, discussing issues in both quantitative and qualitative analysis and the way that women’s legal experiences are interpreted and reconstructed. This chapter therefore serves as a valuable standalone introduction to town courts and their records, as well as the basis for the remainder of the book.

This chapter examines women’s roles in trespass litigation, revealing a wide range of misbehaviour, including physical and verbal assault, theft and damage to property. These pleas allow us to access urban life, and its sometimes turbulent nature, in vivid detail, and the chapter utilises these pleas to explore the nature and implications of women’s involvement in misbehaviour, as both victims and perpetrators. The chapter examines the nature of this misconduct and the ways that this transcended gendered patterns of honour and wrongdoing that have dominated other studies, instead showing how women’s involvement in trespasses encompassed the full range of offences that fell within this category. It discusses the role of family and household ties in trespasses and the resultant litigation, including the way that ties between husbands and wives played out in court. It also explores the use of litigation as an important part of the process of restoring damaged reputations and publicising the misdemeanours of others.

Drawing heavily on the original interviews conducted during the research, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the history of the Prevent policy. This chapter identifies the key discursive and organisational shifts that have occurred within the development of Prevent, periodising Prevent into three distinct phases: 2001–6; 2007–10; and 2011–15. It demonstrates that the changes to Prevent reflect an underlying debate that sits at the heart of the policy: should Prevent focus on those at imminent risk of radicalisation? Or should the focus be broader, engaging with the ideas and values of communities that may justify and enable violent extremism? A security and an identity strand. The debate between these positions, narrated in the interviews and policy documents, represents the conventional narrative of Prevent, where, at times, the strands are brought together, and at times, it is their separation that is advocated.

This chapter examines women’s involvement in commercial litigation through analysis of debt pleas from the three towns of Nottingham, Chester and Winchester. It uses debt pleas to offer a new insight into women’s work and trading relationships and the ways in which this brought them into contact with the law, as both plaintiffs and defendants, at different stages of their lives, and at all levels within the local economy. Debt pleas were one of the key ways in which women engaged in litigation within medieval towns, making their role within these pleas key to understanding women’s experiences of the law more broadly. The chapter analyses women’s involvement in debt pleas through both quantitative and qualitative analysis, tracing changes over time in levels of women’s commercial litigation as well as examining the nature of these cases as illustrated through numerous examples. It also deals in detail with the status of married women in these pleas, contrasting the extent to which they were able to take legal action alongside their husbands in the courts of different towns, and how this developed or changed over time.

The term ‘publication bias’ describes the statistical distortion of data when pharmaceutical groups suppress or manipulate research data. This chapter uses publication bias as a paradigmatic case in order to examine four aspects of the third-party effects of constitutional rights, and to develop alternatives. (1) The third-party effect has so far been configured in an individualist perspective only, but in order to deal with structural conflicts within society constitutional rights in private relations have to be reformulated in their collective-institutional dimension. (2) Instead of being limited to the protection against state-equivalent power in society, the third-party effect must be widened and directed against all communication media with expansive tendencies. (3) Contextualising constitutional rights ought not to be limited to adapting these rights to the particularities of private law. (4) Instead of imposing duties to protect exclusively on state actors, third-party effects must address private actors who violate constitutional rights and at the same time activate counter-forces within society.

This chapter examines how the legal status of female servants and slaves evolved over the course of the seventeenth century, and how women in service challenged the structures of patriarchy that governed familial relationships. Female servants had a relatively wide spectrum of legal rights and routinely filed petitions with the courts for breach of contract. The legal relationship between a master and a female servant was dependent on a contract that stipulated the amount of time to be served, as well as the remuneration the servant would receive for her labour. The legal action taken by female servants shows that although they were at the bottom of the household hierarchy, they exercised a form of subordinate agency in the courts. In contrast, slaves had no legal standing. A master owned the labour of his servants while they were under contract, but not the servant themselves. The legal relationship between a master and a slave, however, was not subject to the terms of a contract. Masters owned not only the labour of their slaves, but also their persons; this made it legally impossible for slaves to bring any grievances against their masters to court.

This chapter analyses how specific individuals who are deemed vulnerable to radicalisation are governed. It articulates Prevent as a targeted, counter-radicalisation programme, most clearly expressed through the Channel project. Channel functions through identifying individuals deemed vulnerable to becoming violent, through identifying the ‘vulnerability indicators’ they display in the present. Channel thus acts as an institutional space to make visible and then intervene into performances of identity that are read as constituting a potential threat. In so doing, it invokes and reworks a pastoral power of care. This power seeks to produce the truth of the individual through interpreting the signs they display in the present. Once identified, intervention is required to bring the individual back to a ‘secure’ identity.