The People's Courts? Summary Justice and Social Relations in the City of London, c.1760–1800

Abstract

Using the records of the Guildhall and Mansion

Automated Justice: Issues, Benefits and Risks in the Use of Artificial Intelligence and Its Algorithms in Access to Justice and Law Enforcement

“…The substituting of judges with algorithms has been justified by the need to relieve overloaded courts of justice. Political actors on all sides have been trying to do this since access to the law was considered a fundamental right during the Enlightenment (Gray 2008). Indeed, access to the judge to settle disputes with the constituted bodies (police, state, etc.)…”

Street politics

“…51 Bull runs were of course popular in early modern Spain, but even in eighteenth-century London, passers-by would have to jump out of the way as hundreds of men would chase the animals, on their way to the slaughterhouse, through the crowded streets, an activity that the authorities increasingly sought to suppress. 52 Crowds of young men found different ways to assert their masculinity in public space. 53 In many Italian cities, young men engaged in sassaiole (staged fights with stones), which could turn into veritable battles, often with political undertones, with rocks aimed at specific statues or buildings.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2008

“…Despite an increase in research on reporting crime in the press, few studies exist of execution reports from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Dyndor argues that newspapers stressed the efficacy of the execution process in order to project an image of infallibility upon the criminal justice system. Dodsworth, meanwhile, profiles the advocates of a police force in the eighteenth century in the context of prevailing ideas about moral reformation, while Gray explores the world of summary justice in the City of London through the records of the Guildhall and Mansion House justicing rooms, which were accessible to more people than were the Assizes and Quarter Sessions. These records reveal much about Londoners' attitudes to the law in the second half of the eighteenth century.…”