Introduction: two stories

This chapter links two stories, each with sub-plots. The first concerns one of the most famous cases in English legal history, the story of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters, who were hanged in 1923 for the murder of Edith's husband, Percy. The second is the story of two scholars in different departments in the same institution who over several years had worked on the case and had each completed a substantial study before they learned of one another's interests. The first story is both a human tragedy and a historical mystery; the second exemplifies the fragmentation of learning and illustrates contrasting approaches to history by two scholars from different academic cultures. This chapter is a case-study of the methods of a jurist (William Twining) and a Shakespearean (René Weis) in approaching the question: Was Edith Thompson guilty of the murder of Percy Thompson? We shall start with the more modest tale.

The jurist's tale

Early in the 1970s I began to use original trial records as a vehicle for teaching evidence to undergraduate law students, first at the University of Warwick and later at the University of Miami. I was concerned with both the theory of proof in legal contexts and certain practical techniques of inferential reasoning, as part of what is known as the logic of proof. In particular, I was interested in how to construct and criticize complex arguments based on evidence in legal contexts.