The English Urban Magistracy and the Administration of Justice During the Early Nineteenth Century: Wolverhampton 1815–1860

Swift, Roger

doi:10.1179/mdh.1992.17.1.75

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The justices of the peace who oversaw petty sessions were generally either county magistrates on a circuit or borough magistrates. These positions had been the domain of large landholders, but by the early decades of the 19th century industrialists and their sympathetic professional allies were ascending to the bench as they achieved greater political power to influence nominations (Frank 2005, p. 408;Philips 1976;Swift 1992;Trainor 1993, pp. 167-70 According to the law, magistrates were to recuse themselves when cases came before the bench involving potential conflicts of interests, and adjudication of disputes within their own industries was clearly such a case.…”

Section: Adding the Lawmentioning

confidence: 98%

Marx, formal subsumption and the law

Steinberg

2010

Theor Soc

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Recent work rethinking the place of the law in Marxian analysis of capitalist society provides us with a foundation for a renewed look at the labor process. Drawing on this literature, which emphasizes the materiality of institutions through which labor is exploited, and returning to Marx's discussion of formal subsumption in Capital, I argue that the law was central for subordinating labor. I then present three case studies from industries in Victorian England to demonstrate the diverse ways in which law was implicated in formal subsumption. The case studies focus on the ways in which capitalists used master and servant law, the key law governing the workplace, to subordinate labor. I conclude by considering how these cases provoke us to consider the materiality of the law in labor relations more broadly, and such questions might be pursued in developing capitalist economies such as China."But the really difficult point to discuss here is how relations of production develop unevenly as legal relations."-Karl Marx (1973, p. 109) Over the past several decades considerable attention has been focused on developing Marx's theory of the capitalist labor process. A number of social scientists and historians have sought to build on Marx's analysis in Capital, particularly in the wake of Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital. Throughout numerous debates on labor control, however, the place of the law has been conspicuously absent. 1 This silence on law and its role in the process of capitalist exploitation has several sources. First, as I discuss below, Marx himself in Capital and other works made infrequent reference to law in the development of capitalist labor relations. Relatedly, he focused on the technical relations of production with the real

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