James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) is still highly valued as a judge, as the historian of the criminal law of England, and as the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a forthright disagreement with John Stuart Mill. Stephen's weekly journalism established him as a vigorous cross-examiner in the controversies—cultural, social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical—of his time (and duly, of our time). Collected here now are his essays on the novel and journalism, the co-operation and collusion of these two, their responsibilities and irresponsibilities. Written between 1855 and 1867, while Stephen prosecuted twin careers as barrister and journalist, these reviews bring to bear his formidable powers of mind and of phrasing, scrutinizing many deep and disconcerting novelists—Dickens and Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe and E. C. Gaskell, Flaubert and Balzac. His work also weighs journalism in the scales: from Addison's The Spectator to the Crimean war correspondence of William Howard Russell; from the scabrously detailed law-reports in The Times to the phenomenon of Letters to its Editor; from the high culture of Matthew Arnold to the mass market of 'Railroad Bookselling'.

The first volume to be published in Oxford's new edition of the Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen, this volume contains The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey,

Examines the entanglement of secularity and liberality in the foundation of the modern state in Britain. "Modern" Britain emerged from the outcome of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The rather standard Whig account of the long nineteenth century is one of growing stability, progress and improvement. And yet nothing was preordained or inevitable about the period's stability. Ruling elites felt the constant anxieties of revolutionary terrorism. As Lubenow argues, it was a period of disorganization seeking organization. The great nineteenth-century reform acts against religious monopoly were aspects of this process of political organization. While religion did not disappear, these political actions gradually changed the constitutional position of religion. As a result, a political vacuum was created which was then filled by a secular "clerisy". These "fit and proper persons", educated in the reformed universities, qualified by success in competitive examinations, began to fill positions in the Civil Service and in the professions. The effect was to replace the eighteenth-century system of confessional loyalties with a liberal political culture based on merit. Lubenow's latest study examines the work of these intertwining nineteenth-century secular-liberal processes. Steeped deeply in archival research, this book considers biographical characteristics such as education, political connections and social associations, but it is equally conceptually guided by categories such as liberalism and secularism. It fills an important gap in the political history of nineteenth-century British liberalism by taking up the question of entanglement of secularity and liberality in the foundation of the modern state.

Today, every continent retains elements of the legal code distributed by the British empire. The British empire created a legal footprint along with political, economic, cultural and racial ones. One of the central problems of political theory is the insurmountable gap between ideas and their realization. Keally McBride argues that understanding the presently fraught state of the concept of the rule of law around the globe relies upon understanding how it was first introduced and then practiced through colonial administration--as well as unraveling the ideas and practices of those who instituted it. The astonishing fact of the matter is that for thirty years, between 1814 and 1844, virtually all of the laws in the British Empire were reviewed, approved or discarded by one individual: James Stephen, disparagingly known as "Mr. Mothercountry." Virtually every single act that was passed by a colony made its way to his desk, from a levy to improve sanitation, to an officer's pay, to laws around migration and immigration, and tariffs on products. Stephen, great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf, was an ardent abolitionist, and he saw his role as a legal protector of the most dispossessed. When confronted by acts that could not be overturned by reference to British law that he found objectionable, he would make arguments in the name of the "natural law" of justice and equity. He truly believed that law could be a force for good and equity at the same time that he was frustrated by the existence of laws that he saw as abhorrent. In Mr. Mothercountry, McBride draws on original archival research of the writings of Stephen and his descendants, as well as the Macaulay family, two major lineages of legal administrators in the British colonies, to explore the gap between the ideal of the rule of law and the ways in which it was practiced and enforced. McBride does this to show that there is no way of claiming that law is always a force for good or simply an ideological cover for oppression. It is both. Her ultimate intent is to illuminate the failures of liberal notions of legality in the international sphere and to trace the power disparities and historical trajectories that have accompanied this failure. This book explores the intertwining histories of colonial power and the idea of the rule of law, in both the past and the present, and it asks what the historical legacy of British Colonialism means for how different groups view international law today.

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) is still highly valued as a judge, as the historian of the criminal law of England, and as the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a forthright disagreement with John Stuart Mill. Stephen's weekly journalism established him as a vigorous cross-examiner in the controversies--cultural, social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical--of his time (and duly, of our time). Collected here now are his essays on the novel and journalism, the co-operation and collusion of these two, their responsibilities and irresponsibilities. Written between 1855 and 1867, while Stephen prosecuted twin careers as barrister and journalist, these reviews bring to bear his formidable powers of mind and of phrasing, scrutinizing many deep and disconcerting novelists--Dickens and Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe and E. C. Gaskell, Flaubert and Balzac. His work also weighs journalism in the scales: from Addison's The Spectator to the Crimean war correspondence of William Howard Russell; from the scabrously detailed law-reports in The Times to the phenomenon of Letters to its Editor; from the high culture of Matthew Arnold to the mass market of 'Railroad Bookselling'.

The latest volume in Oxford's new edition of Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen, this volume brings together thirty-five essays expressing Stephen's views on the questions of his day, which have not lost their interest in ours.