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Law & Humanities Blog

Posted: 24 May 2012 02:45 PM PDT

Robin Callender Smith, University of London, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Law, has published The Missing Witness? George V, Competence and Compellability and the Criminal Libel Trial of Edward Frederick Mylius. Here is the abstract.

A criminal libel trial in 1911 set the monarch against one of his subjects. Edward Mylius repeated a rumour that accused King George V of marrying Queen Mary when – secretly – the King had already married someone else and had three children. The criminal charge, the process used to bring the issue to court, the advice to the King of the relevant Ministers (including Winston Churchill as Home Secretary) and the trial itself stretched the boundaries of fairness. The legacy of the trial created a lingering problem.

Can the monarch ever be required to face the direct scrutiny of examination by being required to appear as a witness in his or her own court to support a personal complaint?Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Nineteenth Century Novelists and Crime

Posted: 24 May 2012 01:36 PM PDT

Elizabeth Burney, University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology, has published Crime and Criminology in the Eye of the Novelist: Trends in Nineteenth Century Literature at 51 Howard Journal of Criminal Justice 160 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Many leading novelists of the 19th Century were deeply concerned with crime and its causes, reflecting concerns of the period and often raising ideas which find resonance with modern criminological theories. The structural causes of crime; the negative effect of ill‐treatment and harsh punishment; labelling theory; the possibility of redemption and desistance; the ingrained flaws in individual characters which result in a propensity to crime and deviance, enhanced by bad influences and criminogenic environments; the social pressures (labelled 'strain theory' by criminologists) which drive outsiders to gain wealth and status by illegitimate means – all these can be found in fiction of the period. This article takes examples from English, French and Russian literature to illustrate these themes. The article also links fiction to the development of perceptions about crime and criminals as the century progressed.

The full text is not available from SSRN.