While a novelist and short story writer may not have been an obvious choice for an appointment to the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53), Elizabeth Bowen’s presence on the commission was vital precisely for those credentials. This essay explores Bowen’s approach to criminality and punishment through her contributions to and commentary on the commission alongside her short fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. She had been thinking and writing about murder, criminality, and the adjudication and punishment for decades before the commission heard its first testimony. She made two explicit interventions in the outcomes of the report – regarding the status of verbal provocation and the importance placed on marital status in murder cases – but her influence far exceeded those bounds. Bowen’s explorations and understanding of relationships, human temperament, insanity, mental deficiency or abnormality, and circumstance in her stories enhance British legal understanding and practice.

This chapter considers how and in what contexts the reasonable person standard was applied by the selected colonial courts of the British Empire. The key question is whether the reasonable person imported from England remained English in substance – whether it continued to resemble a man on the Clapham omnibus – or the courts tailored the standard to the specific circumstances before them. As the first section shows, there are many cases in which the reasonable person was equated with an Englishman. This suggests that the standard was static in nature. However, the second section of the chapter complicates this conclusion by introducing numerous cases and settings in which the standard was adapted to specific, local contexts – sometimes so successfully that local variants of it developed. Drawing together the first two sections, the final part considers the nexus between a standard’s resemblance to the people to whom it is applied and the authority of law.

This essay aims to shed light on Sebald the polemicist and provocateur, draw attention to a central component of his literary criticism that is often ignored from an anglophone perspective. The essay first deals with the two academic monographs in which Sebald violently attacks the German-Jewish writers Alfred Döblin and Carl Sternheim, disparaging them as trailblazers for the Nazis. The consistently negative academic reviews Sebald writes from 1970 onwards as a junior academic are discussed as his personal way of participating in the political upheavals of the 1960s. After the rather quiet decade of the 1980s, Sebald’s polemical impetus flares up again, parallel to his emergence as a literary author. Jurek Becker, another German-Jewish author (and Holocaust survivor) once more serves as target of his polemics. What emerges from an examination of his polemical writings are two major findings: first, Sebald tried to learn lessons from the writers he attacked, avoiding what he saw as their flaws in his own writing. Second, Sebald’s lifelong urge to polemicize was closely tied to the issue of upward social mobility, the aggression arising from feeling to be a perpetual outsider in the social environment of academia.

This vintage rape case concerns an Alabama court’s determination that the jury may consider “social conditions and customs founded upon racial differences, such that the prosecutrix was a white woman and the defendant was a Negro man” in assessing a Black defendant’s culpability for assault with intent to rape. This case represents how rape law was weaponized against Black men and is an ideal case for a feminist rewritten opinion to interrogate how race and rape are closely intertwined.

This chapter addresses several central issues in the study of revenge during childhood and adolescence, focusing specifically on moral evaluations of retaliation and retributive justice. We begin by distinguishing among relevant concepts and consider their respective moral status by discussing their moral-philosophical foundations. Next, we summarize and critique classic developmental psychology research on children’s reasoning about retaliation, focusing on Piaget’s (1932) early work but also addressing Kohlberg’s (1981) account when appropriate. This is followed by a discussion of social-cognitive domain theory (SCDT), a constructivist developmental perspective that we assert is better able than earlier psychological approaches to address the ambiguities of provocation, retaliation, and revenge. Consistent with recent trends in SCDT research, we also consider individual differences in children’s evaluations and responses to provocation, focusing on research investigating the social and psychological correlates of retaliatory aggression. Finally, the chapter concludes with a review of key findings and suggestions for future research.

Chapter four looks at the development of the violent struggle and details the options the actors have available to deal with violent challenges. The causal mechanisms leading to escalation here focuses on a different set of shifts in saliency for the belligerents. The chapter shows that important escalatory potential can be found in the response of the state towards the sometimes only peaceful expression of opposition. The cases that are brought forward here are Northern Ireland and the Philippines in the 1970s, where escalation was triggered by the specific responses from the government.

This chapter considers three different torts: battery (unlawful physical touching); assault (an apprehension or threat of unlawful touching); and false imprisonment (unlawful confinement or constraint). While their common aim is to protect the integrity of C’s person, the ingredients of each tort are quite disparate.

As a preliminary matter of terminology: trespass to the person is a form of action, but assault, battery, and false imprisonment are causes of action.

A long-standing objective for the Lateran Project has been to draw on structural evidence from the Lateran scavi to model the Constantinian Basilica.Lex Bosman has similarly sought to model the structure, initially from observation of the fabric of the standing Archbasilica. This chapter presents the happy outcome of collaboration between these two approaches.Using state-of-the-art visualisation techniques, the authors have brought together the evidence for the interior and exterior appearance of the Constantinian Basilica. The chapter argues that while based on exhaustive research, these 3D models should nevertheless be best understood as ߢprovocationsߣ.Production of these ߢprovocationsߣ is itself an important vehicle for analysis, because it exposes gaps in understanding as each new model drives and is driven by evolving debates about structure, decoration and illumination.

This chapter explores the contexts of spousal violence, and considers the evolution of the legal discourses and judicial practices around this issue, and examines what this violence tells us about power, control and intimacy within marriages.It was widely believed in the nineteenth century that spousal assault was rare in Ireland, while it was thought to be a common practice in England.In the evolution of Irish national identity in post-Famine Ireland such beliefs distinguished the Irish from the English.Irish men were held to be morally superior to English men.But such beliefs were unfounded. More husbands abused and killed their wives, than wives did husbands. Husbands used their wives’ behaviour, their disobedience, intemperance, infidelity, lack of female virtue, inadequate fortunes, as excuses for causing a turn to violence or their wives’ deaths. Verbal and physical conflicts, could in the context of alcohol, spiral out of control. Money and property were also the causes of violence, as was the distribution of household resources.Some women feared the loss of their homes and other property and killed to protect their interests. Certain acts of violence were judged legitimate when particular contexts were taken into consideration.A drunken wife or a brutish and violent husband could, for example, see murder charges being reduced to manslaughter charges.

This chapter concerns Coetzee’s encounter with philosophers and philosophy. After a brief description of Coetzee’s formation and institutional affiliations, it turns its focus to the ways in which Coetzee has probed both the capacity of literary works to confront philosophical questions and the innate capacities and limitations of philosophy’s own embedded disciplinary procedures and approved forms of discourse. It argues that Coetzee has done this by developing provocations: elaborating propositions – about the nature of human language, consciousness, and being; about the nature of truth, knowledge, and existence – that entice and frustrate philosophical readers, asking that they at least consider what their discipline takes for granted or leaves out of account in its framing of these issues.

The chapter explores the collapse of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in the Contested Region. The overland Underground Railroad networks in the region were quickly being bypassed by the railroad transportation in the 1850s. Nevertheless, the high-profile fugitive rescues in the Free Soil Region convinced slave catchers that their efforts were better focused farther south, and as a result slave catching accelerated in the Contested Region in the middle and late 1850s. This led to a series of confrontations in which the behavior of the slave catchers and accompanying US Marshals was egregiously violent. Attempts by local and state authorities to bring the assailants to justice were frustrated by federal judges who fully sanctioned their recourse to the violence of mastery. These cases rendered the region’s conditional toleration of slave catching untenable. The result was a striking shift in the culture of violence as the region embraced the outright defiance that had long characterized Free Soil communities. As a consequence, in the late 1850s, the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act collapsed outside the narrow strip of territory that comprised the Borderland.

Opening with a dramatic encounter between two angry lords and their opposing retinues of loyal men, Chapter 3 explores the role played by anger in medieval English legal and literary culture. Following a brief introduction to the field of the history of emotion, the chapter explores the etymology of several anger-related words in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. Using John Gower’s Mirour de l’Homme, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of medieval English understandings of the passion of anger. Moving from literature to legal texts, the chapter then explores the language used in the plea rolls to describe sudden anger, long-standing hatred, and other emotion-filled states. The chapter closes with another Gower tale in which the sin of incest is treated as secondary to the damnable sin of uncontrolled wrath.

Opening with a dramatic encounter between two angry lords and their opposing retinues of loyal men, Chapter 3 explores the role played by anger in medieval English legal and literary culture. Following a brief introduction to the field of the history of emotion, the chapter explores the etymology of several anger-related words in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, and Middle English. Using John Gower’s Mirour de l’Homme, the chapter demonstrates the complexities of medieval English understandings of the passion of anger. Moving from literature to legal texts, the chapter then explores the language used in the plea rolls to describe sudden anger, long-standing hatred, and other emotion-filled states. The chapter closes with another Gower tale in which the sin of incest is treated as secondary to the damnable sin of uncontrolled wrath.

Having encountered the manifold ways in which anger and related passions are employed in the plea rolls in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 then situates those legal texts within their broader cultural context, including the notion of the Last Judgement as the dies irae, or day of ire. Acknowledging that anger could be viewed in some contexts as a commendable emotion, the chapter then turns to the many reasons why confessors’ manuals and popular literary texts cautioned against cultivating anger in one’s personal life. For example, the chapter explains how anger was perceived to separate a person from his or her capacity to reason and how anger might escalate from thoughts to words to violent actions if allowed to develop into habit. The chapter then closes with some reflections on the nature of provocation in the medieval English felony context.

Chapter 5 looks at the other form of contributory fault: a defence called investment reprisal. Aside from the different causal relation that an instance of investment reprisal has to the relevant loss in comparison to mismanagement, the former involves wrongful conduct on the part of the investor, rather than risky conduct. For this reason, investment reprisal is a form of investor misconduct, which brings it close to another defence: post-establishment illegality. In establishing their doctrinal foundations, special attention is paid to how the circumstances that activate them differ from similar circumstances that relate to different rules, such as the legality requirement for jurisdiction. The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to detailing these defences’ legal content and traversing the difficult questions on jurisdiction and admissibility that they raise. Again, the opportunity is taken to propose a reason-based method for apportioning liability when these defences apply, and the concluding sections distinguish them from other related legal concepts.