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We call habeas corpus the Great Writ of Liberty. But it was actually a writ of power. In a work based on an unprecedented study of thousands of cases across more than five hundred years, Paul Halliday provides a sweeping revisionist account of the world's most revered legal device. In the decades around 1600, English judges used ideas about royal power to empower themselves to protect the king's subjects. The key was not the prisoner's "right" to "liberty"Ñthese are modern idiomsÑbut the possible wrongs committed by a jailer or anyone who ordered a prisoner detained. This focus on wrongs gave the writ the force necessary to protect ideas about rights as they developed outside of law. This judicial power carried the writ across the world, from Quebec to Bengal. Paradoxically, the representative impulse, most often expressed through legislative action, did more to undermine the writ than anything else. And the need to control imperial subjects would increasingly constrain judges. The imperial experience is thus crucial for making sense of the broader sweep of the writ's history and of English law. Halliday's work informed the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush on prisoners in the Guant‡namo detention camps. His eagerly anticipated book is certain to be acclaimed the definitive history of habeas corpus.
Previous edition, 2nd, published in 1994.
This book is the most comprehensive account of the role of habeas corpus in wartime ever written. It draws on a wealth of untapped resources to shed light on the political and legal understanding of habeas corpus that has unfolded over the course of Anglo-American history. The book traces the roots of the habeas privilege enshrined in the United States Constitution to England and then carries the story forward to document the profound influence of English law on early American law. It then takes the story forward to document the understanding of the privilege and the role of suspension over the course of American history.
Examines the rise of an American-run global detention system, including Guantâanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and secret CIA jails, and discusses efforts that are being made to challenge this new prison system through habeas corpus.
Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures – and honors – a chorus of the dead. The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and actions reported by eyewitnesses and spoken by the condemned – so limpidly framed that at moments one forgets the skill that tautens and crystallizes all this into authentic poetry: The warehouse was dingy, cluttered with lumber:thirteen steps, noose, black mask. No hymn, no psalm.He spat out his gum in the chaplain’s outstretched palm.Habeas Corpus: you have the body. With a rare control of indignation by sorrow, of subjectivity by the subject’s own truth, McDonough’s unsparing sonnets reveal the enormity that is the death penalty in America: “a ladder, a hanging tree” for Mary Dyer, “an odor he'd/described in print as peach blossoms, sickening-sweet” for Caryl Chessman, “a hood, their/target, then bang, bang, bang, three noises, quick” for Gary Gilmore, “Two needles in his arm,/blood splatters on the sheet” for Charles Brooks. Taking the words of fifty out of the nearly 20,000 men and women executed since 1608, she reflects them back to us in works of self-effacing artistry. Resurrected from their obscurity these individuals speak our secret history.
Habeas corpus is the principal means under the common law for the protection of personal liberty. By this ancient writ, the court assumes control over the body of a prisoner so it can discharge him or her to freedom if no proper legal cause can be shown for detention. Habeas corpus secures release from any form of custody, whether decreed by the highest powers of the state or the lowest gangland slave-trader. Its reach is as diverse as the forms of confinement. For just two examples beyond the prison wall, a patient wrongly detained for compulsory medical treatment can invoke its protection and it can even be deployed to determine the proper parental custody of a child. This volume looks first at the historical development of the writ, tracing its growth in significance until its emergence as an item of central constitutional importance. Having established the traditional place of habeas corpus, the volume goes on to examine the limits of the remedy today. It describes the modern workings of the application for habeas corpus and assesses the scope, function, and role of the procedure. It explores the relationship between habeas corpus and fundamental rights. The volume critically surveys the nature of judicial review on habeas corpus and investigates past, present, and potential future uses of the writ. It aims to provide a comprehensive statement of current English law, with added discussion of the position in other Commonwealth countries. The volume concludes with a guide to procedure and sample forms.
When Chief Justice Taney declared Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional and demanded the release of John Merryman, Lincoln defied the order, offering a forceful counter-argument for the constitutionality of his actions. The result was one of the most significant cases in American legal history—a case that resonates in our own time.
For most Americans, habeas corpus is the cornerstone of our legal system: the principal constitutional check on arbitrary government power, allowing an arrested person to challenge the legality of his detention. In a study that could not be more timely, Justin Wert reexamines this essential individual right and shows that habeas corpus is not necessarily the check that we've assumed. Habeas corpus, it emerges, is as much a tool of politics as it is of law. In this first study of habeas corpus in an American political context, Wert shifts our collective emphasis from the judicial to the political-toward the changes in the writ influenced by Congress, the president, political parties, state governments, legal academics, and even interest groups. By doing so, he reveals how political regimes have used habeas corpus both to undo the legacies of their predecessors and to establish and enforce their own vision of constitutional governance. Tracing the history of the writ from the Founding to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Boumediene v. Bush, Wert illuminates crucial developmental moments in its evolution. He demonstrates that during the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Gilded Age, Great Society, and the ongoing war on terrorism, habeas corpus has waxed and waned in harmony with the interests of majoritarian politics. Along the way, Wert identifies and explains the political context of fine points of law that many political scientists and historians may not be aware of—such as the exhaustion rule requiring that a federal habeas participant must first exhaust all possible claims for relief in state court, a maneuver by which the post-Reconstruction Court abandoned supervision of race relations in the South. Especially in light of the new scrutiny of habeas corpus prompted by the Guantánamo detainees, Wert's book is essential for broadening our understanding of how law and politics continue to intersect after 9/11. Brimming with fresh insights into constitutional development and regime theory, it shows that the Great Writ of Liberty may not be so great as we have supposed-because while it has the potential to enforce conceptions of rights that are consistent with the best ideals of American politics, it also has the potential to enforce its worst aspects as well.
Habeas Corpus is the process by which state prisoners—particularly those on death row—appeal to federal courts to have their convictions overturned. Its proper role in our criminal justice system has always been hotly contested, especially in the wake of 1996 legislation curtailing the ability of prisoners to appeal their sentences. In this timely volume, Eric M. Freedman reexamines four of the Supreme Court’s most important habeas corpus rulings: one by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1807 concerning Aaron Burr’s conspiracy, two arising from the traumatic national events of the 1915 Leo Frank case and the 1923 cases growing out of murderous race riots in Elaine County, Arkansas, and one case from 1953 that dramatized some of the ugliest features of the Southern justice of the period. In each instance, Freeman uncovers new original sources and tells the stories of the cases through such documents as the Justices’ draft opinions and the memos of law clerk William H. Rehnquist. In bracing and accessible language, Freedman then presents an interpretation that rewrites the conventional view. Building on these results, he challenges legalistic limits on habeas corpus and demonstrates how a vigorous writ is central to implementing the fundamental conceptions of individual liberty and constrained government power that underlie the Constitution.