Aims
This course aims to:
• introduce you to the complex relationship of history and law
• help you to place and understand a series of landmark legal cases in their historical, social and political contexts
• help you to discuss and make an informed assessment of the continuing historical significance of these legal cases and their continuing relevance today
Content
The path from studying history to practising law is one which many history graduates have taken, and it is not difficult to see why: both depend on the use and interpretation of evidence to support the presentation of a case. But the relationship between the two can go much deeper: many historical trials can also act as doorways into an understanding of their historical context and of its relevance to today.
This course considers five celebrated trials, each very different from the others yet each also illuminating many aspects of the society that produced it. The impeachment of Warren Hastings (1788-1775) took place in the medieval grandeur of Westminster Hall – scene of the trial of King Charles I – and it was concerned with the ethics and morality of the East India Company’s government of Bengal. Yet its political setting was fitting for what was also a political trial, a battle between government and opposition, in which the prosecution also established the underlying assumptions that would underpin British imperial expansion in the century that followed.
A century later that imperial confidence was under severe strain and British self-doubt was reflected in the trial of the celebrated and fashionable writer Oscar Wilde (1895) for homosexual activity. This was much more than an individual tragedy, for it revealed an undercurrent of British society that many ignored, and which left British society deeply shaken. Wilde eventually took refuge in France, which was convulsed in its own internal torment, where the trial of the Jewish military intelligence officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1894-1906), was tearing the country apart and casting doubt over some of the most cherished institutions and assumptions of the Third Republic.
The antisemitism revealed in the Dreyfus Case was echoed by the visceral hatred for Jews highlighted by the Nuremberg Trial (1945-1946) of Nazi leaders instituted by the victorious allies at the end of the Second World War. It established the principle that government are answerable to international law but, to the disappointment of some, it did not treat the Holocaust as a separate case from other Crimes Against Humanity. Fifty years after Nuremberg there were some who were denying the Holocaust ever happened and their day of reckoning also came in courtroom, when the British writer David Irving (1996) unsuccessfully sued the American historian Deborah Lipstadt for libel. In a world of post-truth and fake news, can history and law keep the truth safe?
Presentation of the course
The main method of presentation will be illustrated lectures, with time built in for class discussion.
Course sessions
1. The impeachment of Warren Hastings, 1788-1795
The case against the East India Company’s government role in India also laid the foundations for British imperial expansion.
2. The trials of Oscar Wilde, 1895
Oscar Wilde’s dramatic fall from grace was not just a cause celebre; it reflected a crisis of confidence in Britain’s sense of its own identity.
3. The Dreyfus Case, 1894-1906
The condemnation of Captain Dreyfus for espionage was a miscarriage of justice that undermined France’s status as a land of republican liberty.
4. The Nuremberg Trial, 1945-46
Justice, retribution or revenge? The first major international trial raised serious questions about the nature of war and the criminal culpability of national governments.
5. Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt, 1996
The collapse of David Irving’s libel case revealed him as a denier of the Holocaust and raised important questions about Truth and the relationship of history and the law.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• to talk with confidence and knowledge about major themes relating to the trials covered
in the course
• to discuss with insight and understanding the historical issues and questions the trials raise for the historian
• to reach an informed assessment of the ways in which history and law can relate to, and learn from, each other
