Lois Bibbings’s book shortlisted for SLSA Prize

Lois Bibbings’s latest monograph, Binding Men: Stories about Violence and Law in Late Victorian England (Routledge 2014), has been shortlisted for the SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize for the most outstanding book published which makes a contribution to socio-legal theory or socio-legal history.

Binding Men tells stories about men, violence and law in late Victorian England. It does so by focusing upon five important legal cases, all of which were binding not only upon the males involved but also upon future courts and the men who appeared before them.
The subject matter of Prince (1875), Coney (1882), Dudley and Stephens (1884), Clarence (1888) and Jackson (1891) ranged from child abduction, prize-fighting, murder and cannibalism to transmitting gonorrhoea and the capture and imprisonment of a wife by her husband. Each case has its own chapter, depicting the events which led the protagonists into the courtroom, the legal outcome and the judicial pronouncements made to justify this, as well as exploring the broader setting in which the proceedings took place. In so doing, Binding Men describes how a particular case can be seen as being a part of attempts to legally limit male behaviour.