Events
CUHK LAW CCTL Transnational Legal History Group Book Talk – ‘Trials of Sovereignty: Mercy, Terror and the Making of Criminal Law in British India, 1857-1922’ by Prof. Alastair McClure
21 Nov 2024
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm (HKT)
The Warren Chan Moot Court, CUHK Graduate Law Centre, Central, Hong Kong
Prof. Alastair McClure is a legal historian of modern South Asia and the British Empire with research interests that focus largely on the history of criminal law and state violence. His most recent publications have included studies of courtroom archives, corporal punishment, capital punishment, and censorship. This research has been supported by grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and the University Grants Council, Hong Kong. Before joining the University of Hong Kong, he completed postdoctoral fellowships at McGill University and the University of Chicago. Between September to December of 2023, he was an ICAS:MP research fellow based in New Delhi. He also acts as the co-convenor of the Asian Legal History Seminar Series, hosted by the Department of History and the Faculty of Law, and is an associate editor for Law and History Review.
https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13696822
Registration Deadline: 20 November 2024, 12:30pm (HKT)
Trials of Sovereignty offers the first legal history of mercy and discretion in nineteenth and twentieth-century India. Through a study of large-scale amnesties, the prerogative powers of pardon, executive commutation, and judicial sentencing practices, Alastair McClure argues that discretion represented a vital facet of colonial rule. In a bloody penal order, officials and judges consistently offered reduced sentences and pardons for select subjects, encouraging others to approach state institutions and confer the colonial state with greater legitimacy. Mercy was always a contested expression of sovereign power that risked exposing colonial weakness. This vulnerability was gradually recognized by colonial subjects who deployed a range of legal and political strategies to interrogate state power and question the lofty promises of British colonial justice. By the early twentieth century, the decision to break the law and reject imperial overtures of mercy had developed into a crucial expression of anticolonial politics.
Language: English
*CPD credits are available upon application and subject to accreditation by the Law Society of Hong Kong (currently pending).
