The third chapter studies how a 330-man Northwest Mounted Police force was assembled in response to rumoured law-and-order issues that framed the report’s recommendation. This force marched into Alberta in late 1874 (see Figure 1.2) with plans to deploy Dominion law sovereignly over legally plural contexts. With relatively few officers, and claiming jurisdiction over vast geographies, the force set about arranging spectacular symbolic performances of criminal accusation. Senior police officers met with Indigenous leaders to discuss possible targets for legal governance. Based on meetings with leaders in southern Alberta the Mounted Police negotiated an initial target – a socially injurious liquor trade. A discernible socio-political logic lay behind the symbolic projections of a stable, ascendent, and enduring Dominion rule by criminal law. Theatres of accusation provided performatively staged openings to that law.

Institutions are the system of legal rules and social norms that enhance individual economic property rights. Individuals take them as exogenous, but they are endogenous to the entire system. Institutions are complicated distributions of economic property rights and are therefore the result of attempts to maximize wealth net of the transaction costs involved. This chapter defines institutions, relates them to property rights, reviews the literature, and provides numerous examples of institutions and their evolution.

Our penultimate chapter explores the extent to which the Tudor period saw a legal renaissance. It examines developments in the common law courts but also explores the development of new conciliar courts outside the common law, most notably star chamber and the court of equity, which were to prove influential. It also examines the further rise in the use and importance of statute law in this period, demonstrating that the Reformation statutes that split England from the Roman Catholic Church underscored the power of Parliamentary statute. Attention is also given to some developments in the common law courts during this period concerning the law of obligations (the development of the principle of consideration in contract law), property law (the development of the writ of ejectment that replaced the older land law writs and the origins of the law of trusts) and criminal law (the development of the distinction between murder and manslaughter).

This chapter completes our examination of the long Plantagenet period, which culminated in the bloody War of the Roses. However, as the chapter title makes plain, the focus is on the impact that the deadly plague of this period had upon law and order. The chapter explores the different interpretations made of the importance of the Black Death and surveys developments of this period such as the origins of what we would today call employment law, significant increases in the effectiveness of the administration of justice chiefly through increased powers for justices of the peace and important developments in both law of obligations (exploring how actions on the case developed from the writ of trespass and how it further developed into the action on the case for assumpsit) and the criminal law (focusing on treason and murder).

This chapter explores the role of the European court system in establishing the foundations of European criminal law and influencing its subsequent development. It opens with an historical overview of the emergence of the various elements within the judicial system focusing on the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights. Particular emphasis is placed in the discussion on the contribution of the CJEU to the field of EU criminal law as it evolved during the Union’s formative years. Through its case law, the Court acted at various times as ‘the motor of European integration’ and the arbitrator of disputes over EU competence and the primacy of EU law. The chapter then moves to the contemporary setting of judicial engagement with the principle of mutual recognition by exploring the implications of certain judgments on the European Arrest Warrant. Consideration is given in this discussion to the increasing and progressive emphasis within the jurisprudence on the essential role of the European court system in ensuring due process and safeguarding fundamental rights.

The chapter questions whether Tolstoy’s ideology was weakening the legitimacy of imperial legality. Beginning with an overview of the state of Russia’s legal system, the chapter examines Tolstoy’s first encounters with the law as a student at Kazan University, his evaluation of public access to justice after the liberal reforms of the 1860s to 1870s, and his ideas of rule of law in general. Disappointed in law as a field of independent expertise, Tolstoy became more interested in true power, which he believed one could find in oneself by understanding the purpose of life. In order to obtain this power, he turned to literature, which he found to be much stronger than law. In his writing he could criticize both the social and political systems in which people participated and the way they had been conditioned not to recognize the horrors of these systems. The most disturbing example Tolstoy witnessed personally was people being forced to serve in the army during war and told that it was their sacred duty to kill. Believing, like his hero Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that the conditions of society corrupt people’s natural goodness, Tolstoy made it his mission to save people from such false ideas and actions being legally and socially imposed upon them.

The Introduction gives a snapshot of the current status of capital punishment around the globe. It gives current statistics from Amnesty International and describes Amnesty International's anti-death penalty campaign in the 1970s that led to the Declaration of Stockholm, which expressed "total and unconditional opposition to the death penalty." The Introduction describes the divide between retentionist and abolitionist countries, highlighting countries that have outlawed capital punishment in their constitutions or through judicial rulings. After detailing how the death penalty was traditionally seen as something other than torture, the Introduction discusses the law's evolving nature--and how the death penalty is increasingly seen as a torturous and cruel punishment that violates human dignity and fundamental human rights. Noting that death sentences are no longer treated as a "lawful sanction" in many locales, the Introduction describes how the U.N. General Assembly has voted on multiple occasions for a global moratorium on executions. The Introduction summarizes the current state of international law as regards capital punishment and previews the book's content.

The second power of the police is used to collect evidence and people, either summarily or by warrant, and present them to a magistrate for adjudication, principally in matters of criminal law. The traditional model assumes the purpose is to establish guilt and determine the appropriate punishment, with the result being incarceration and the harmful and disruptive consequences that often follow from it. A broader conception considers that the law is what signals the government’s legitimate interest in regulating a behavior owing to its risks and consequences, or the manner in which it violates rights, and these statutes are what empower the police to operationalize the government’s interest. This does not mean, however, that the necessary response should always be punitive; it can instead be linkage to care, treatment, or other interventions that address behavior. The chapter closes by observing that the criminal law is nonetheless what empowers the police to act in response to behaviors regardless of the consent or intentions of others, and if the government wishes to retain this ability while shifting crisis response away from police, it will need to solve the puzzle of how actors not empowered by the criminal law can otherwise decisively represent the government’s regulatory interests regarding individual behavior.

In this chapter, I examine how voluntas helps the young lawyer Cicero craft arguments and structure relationships with Roman clients, witnesses, and juries. In the De inventione and forensic speeches, we see his struggle to reconcile tradition with new intellectual tools. As he seeks to bring ratio more fully into Roman legal culture, voluntas plays a plural and ambiguous role. It is an instrument of rational inquiry, as in the competing schemata of criminal responsibility he examines in the De inventione. As it has always been in Roman law, voluntas is the desire of a legally relevant individual, emanating from and attributable to him alone – the marker of his agency and responsibility. So, too, however, is it used to signify the collective goodwill of an audience, which Cicero makes clear is the expert orator’s plaything. The “goodwill” sense of voluntas adds greatly to its durability in moral philosophy. While a sententia or iudicium pertain to a specific question, voluntas marks an ongoing choice or disposition, such as the will of a legislator, to be conserved. Cicero’s objectives for the law go largely unachieved in his time, but they expand Rome’s intellectual field of vision.

Chapter 2 looks at seamen who were ‘aliens’ (non-subjects), and shows that legal distinctions ultimately mattered little to the Navy. Britain was rather open to immigration, and during wartime most residual disabilities of non-subjects were eased for common sailors, who were needed and overall welcome. At the same time, military necessity meant that any advantages which their status as subjects of a different sovereign should have afforded them, most notably protection from impressment (forced service), were often ignored in practice. In courts martial, special accommodations and concessions were granted informally, as a result of perceived cultural ignorance, rather than on the basis of legal status. Finally, naturalisation was liberally bestowed on naval seamen, but it was, this chapter argues, a largely irrelevant benefit. The state was very quick to revoke its protection if this clashed with native allegiances, and during wartime the alien sailor, already allowed to work in both the Navy and merchant vessels, did not stand to gain much from being naturalised. If individual seamen strategically navigated legal status and national allegiances, so did the state itself: when in need of manpower, it did not hesitate to treat its own legal categories and subjecthood boundaries as pliable.