This thought-provoking account of sexual assault cases in Mandate Palestine begins with a case heard in 1944 in Haifa District involving a woman assaulted by a stranger at night as she slept on the roof of her home with her infant daughter. The court disbelieved the woman's account. Why was she sleeping “alone”? Why would a stranger assault her in her sleep? Was it not more plausible that the two were already acquainted, and the alleged assault was simply a consensual act gone wrong? The opening anecdote amply clarifies the book's relevance to our times. It also sets up the notion of plausibility as an analytical tool for comprehending “law in action.” What made the woman's account implausible to the colonial judge? Did the evidence conflict with the woman's testimony? Or did his incredulity have to with his view of Arab Muslim villagers, as well as his own understanding of what constituted “normal” sexual behavior?

Whereas a scrutiny of probability or “the correspondence of the evidence with empirical reality” would bring a top down approach to the study of law, and the notion of credibility would entail a focus on the competence and character of witnesses, the pursuit of plausibility (or on which story makes sense in any particular time and place context) is a lens rich in social context. “The plausible story,” as Darr puts it, “is an outcome of the interplay between law and culture, and it is predicated on communal perceptions of the legal system and legal proceedings as well as on acceptable standards of normality and deviance, gender, morality, nationality, ethnicity, age, religion and other cultural institutions.” (18). Plausibility, with its basis in shared societal knowledge and affect, brings to life the histories of these myriad institutions. The emphasis on plausibility moves away from the scrutiny of substantive rules, more common in the scholarship in law and the British Empire, to procedural and evidentiary norms.

In this exemplary study of law in society, Darr scrutinizes 147 cases of sexual violence, keeping an eye on proliferating statutory prohibitions, as well as the rules of evidence, to demonstrate how legal “proof” is scarcely detachable from its historical context. In the first chapter, Darr analyzes how understandings of sexual crime were transformed with the replacement of the Ottoman legal order with a hybrid system based on common law “qualified by Islamic and French elements in mandate Palestine” (19). As the rest of the book demonstrates, despite the professed neutrality and impartiality of this new system of law, the identity of both the judges and the litigants affected how crime stories were read. Whereas the protection of women and children featured prominently on the agenda of the British in a land entrusted to them by the League of Nations, in practice, the enforcement of child protection measures was tempered by a sensitivity to local differences, or rather by British understandings of this difference. Pushing beyond the shorthand of “colonial difference” widely used to describe how the seemingly universalist principles of the law as well as its uniform standards of proof come undone in colonial contexts (Reference ChatterjeePartha Chatterjee 1993; Reference KolskyElizabeth Kolsky 2005). Darr digs deep into the 147 cases to reveal how myriad forms of difference in ethnicity, race, gender, and even age ultimately helped to determine the plausibility of charges of assault. Whereas scholars have usually focused on interracial rape to show how these narratives constituted national, ethnic and racial identity, Darr shows how the colonial grid of power was altogether visible even in cases of intraracial or intraethnic sexual violence. Not only were romantic relations between Jewish women and Arab men viewed as “implausible” and made legible as sexual crimes (as Darr shows in Chapter 7), presumptions and stereotypes about ethnic character were reflected in the disproportionate representation of Arab men in the ranks of the accused in general (as she argues in Chapter 4). The patterns of enforcement suggest that accusations against Arab men, whether from within or outside the community, were considered more plausible than those against Jewish men. In the author's words, and in her expert hands, these accounts of sexual offence become rich “stories about national identity and the nature of the British Mandate justice system.” (122).

Feminist critics of the law have, of course, long used the study of sexual violence to show how evidentiary standards and legalistic meanings of consent are gendered and embedded in power structures. Chapter 2, which homes in on sodomy, indecent acts, and offences “against the order of nature,” not only fills a gap in a context where such histories have “gone largely unexplored,”(31) but also serves to nuance feminist critiques of gender and power. The reader will be struck, for instance, by the abundance of cases of male on male sexual violence (nearly half of the 147 cases in the corpus), in a context where colonial officials considered sodomy a cultural depravity, and a common “oriental vice.” Darr's attention to the age of the victim in these cases is exemplary and demonstrates that just as a woman's character was considered a factor in the determination of rape cases, the sexual past of young males was also up for medical and moral scrutiny, and reflected both a consensus on the implausibility of male romance, and doubts about male rapability.

In several of the chapters Darr builds on recent calls to pay closer attention to age as a “socially constructed” category akin to and intersecting with categories of gender, race, or class” (50). This is especially important in a chapter devoted to children's narratives of sexual abuse, in which Darr draws attention to the paradox of oath-taking (which exempted children from taking the oath but also rendered their testimony vulnerable), instances of perjury charges (against children who charged adults with assault) and the juridical attention to the sexual history of child complainants, to reveal the gap that opened up between the professed ambition of child protection and the reality on the ground. As Chapter 3 clarifies, 69% of the 147 cases surveyed in the book involved subjects under the age of consent; while commonsense would suggest that cases involving children were more likely to lead to complaints and convictions, the rates were similar for cases involving sexual violence against children and adults. The assumption that children “tended toward imagination, embellishment, and outright fabrication” trumped notions of their sexual innocence. The rather ambivalent treatment of children in the courtrooms is revealing in light of colonial understanding of the mandates as internationally controlled governance “in which the guardianship of peoples resembled the guardianship of minors” (65).

In using “plausibility” as a lens for the study of law in society, the book turns the history of sexual offences in Mandate Palestine into a wider reflection on the history of colonial law; showcases anew how legal norms translated across cultures (as shown through the analysis of the rule of corroboration in Chapter 6); and raises new questions on the relationship between legal evidence and “truth.” It helps nuance feminist histories of consent and rape by foregrounding cases over the statute, and by drawing attention to age as well as sex and gender in the scrutiny of sexual crime. The book will appeal widely to humanists across the disciplines interested in the working of the law as such, or interested in the law as an archive for the study of society.