The central argument is nicely expressed in his subtitle. David Lemmings maintains that, between the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Hanoverian era, the English law placed less and less emphasis on the need for the “consent” of the people at large, and more and more upon its desire to “command” their adherence. Where once Quarter Sessions were a venue for both trial by jury and the hearing of a wide range of public complaints from across the social spectrum, increasingly they became solely devoted to the direction, by a narrow band of elites, of purely administrative matters. More and more crimes, once put to trial before a jury of one's peers, came to be disposed of summarily by justices of the peace. Civil courts, in which judges once nominally afforded justice to all comers, increasingly became the preserve of lawyers whose fees rendered access to “justice” more and more narrowly exclusive. In addition, the volume of parliamentary legislation became more and more vast, even as the claims of Parliament to sovereign authority became less and less challengeable. In short, however much “the law” in England may have gained in detail, specificity, and administrative efficiency (or, at least, elaboration) by the dawn of the Victoria age, it arguably had lost far more on the human level. “The people,” Lemmings concludes, became less and less the basis of “the law” and more and more, simply, its objects.

Few historians of this subject would doubt the broad lineaments of Lemmings's narrative. There is still room to wonder, however, about both the closer details and the larger implications. Did the more “open” and “participatory” legal systems that predated the eighteenth century really serve the interests of “the people” better in anything other than the most general symbolic terms? Seventeenth-century church courts, for instance, may indeed have granted wives separation orders from abusive husbands on the testimony of troubled neighbors, but as Susan Amussen and Joanne Bailey have told us, those neighbors usually expected such women to endure their suffering a very long time before providing that crucial “participation” that might move those courts to act. Enhanced magisterial authority in this area a century later may not have served the interests of women any better. But did it serve them any worse simply because the decision-making power now lay in the hands of a few justices of the peace? To put the case in more general terms: did a change in “the means” by which the law achieved (or failed to achieve) its purposes demonstrably serve “the ends” of “the people” any better (or worse)? For that matter, a number of scholars of social and legal life in the Tudor–Stuart era have begun to question whether or not the quest to find “agency” among those who were structurally disadvantaged has been pressed just a little beyond the bounds of plausibility. It may not matter how “open” or “participatory” any legal system was (or is), in formal terms, if the more powerful operative realities of social life were—and remained—deeply engrained hierarchical, economic, and ideological ones.

Lemmings also tilts against that body of scholarship that argues for the increasing public scrutiny of parliamentary doings, especially after the basic right of newspapers to publish the debates was conceded in the early 1770s. To be sure, the influence upon Parliament of such scrutiny is easily overstated. Such influence did exist, however, and it might sometimes indeed have been more powerful, in an era before the onset of unshakable governing majorities sustained by systemic party discipline, than perhaps it is in our own day. Similarly, although Lemmings doubts the power of petitioning, his perspective overlooks that recent and substantial recrudescence in scholarship which argues that petitioning (and instructions to members of Parliament) really did turn the tide in the most compelling public moral issue of the late Georgian age: the slave trade.

Most strikingly, perhaps, Lemmings does not devote overly much space to considering the role of the enormous social changes of the eighteenth century—urbanization, population growth, economic expansion and transformation, and all their attendant pressures—in providing an essential impetus for many, if not most, of these changes. If officials increasingly sought to streamline the administration of the law by reducing such time-consuming features as jury trial for petty offenses, it must fairly be said that those officials had a vastly greater volume of business to process by the early nineteenth century. One might also question the degree to which Lemmings (and, to be fair, several other recent historians) have argued that levels of criminality were primarily a perceptual matter: a function of “moral panic” driven by an ever more pervasive newspaper press that boosted circulation figures by provoking bourgeois anxieties. In all probability, there really was more crime taking place, especially by the late eighteenth century, than ever before.

Such broad reservations and specific queries should come as no surprise. They are a natural reaction to books of such breadth and ambition as this one. Lemmings has mastered a vast and wide-ranging body of secondary writing, as well as a very substantial amount of primary source material. He has produced a volume that will provoke both admiration and criticism. Above all, he has written one that demands engagement. For those of us who study the law and its workings in the Hanoverian age, it will be virtually impossible to ignore.