Crosby on the Dean of St. Asaph's Case @_Kevin_Crosby_ @hartpublishing

Kevin Crosby, Newcastle Law School, has published R v Shipley (1784): The Dean of St Asaph's Case in Landmark Cases in Criminal Law (Philip Handler, Henry Mares, and Ian Williams, eds., Hart Publishing, 2017). Here is the abstract.

In 1784, William Shipley, the Dean of St Asaph (and the son of St Asaph’s radical bishop Jonathan Shipley), was prosecuted for republishing a controversial political pamphlet. William Jones, the pamphlet’s author, was surprised to find a prosecution for the publication of an abstract work of political philosophy was even possible; and it may have been this, combined with the fact Jones was respectable enough to have been recently elevated to the colonial Bench, which resulted in the Treasury’s refusal to pay the costs of the prosecution. While an English jury was eventually persuaded to convict Shipley ‘of publishing’ the pamphlet, he was subsequently discharged by the judges of King’s Bench, owing to the fact that under the prevailing doctrine of seditious libel a guilty verdict was understood as a de facto special verdict, leaving legal questions (including whether a particular pamphlet was actually seditious) to a later judicial determination. This case is primarily famous because of the challenge it posed to this established doctrine, highlighting the fact this strange form of verdict was, in Lobban’s words, an ‘unworkable stretching of the law’, and because it ultimately led to the passage in 1792 of legislation condemning the practice as contrary to the common law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Criminal cases raise difficult normative and legal questions, and are often a consequence of compelling human drama. In this collection, expert authors place leading cases in criminal law in their historical and legal contexts, highlighting their significance both in the past and for the present. The cases in this volume range from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Many of them are well known to modern criminal lawyers and students; others are overlooked landmarks that deserve reconsideration. The essays, often based on extensive and original archival research, range over a wide spectrum of criminal law, covering procedure and doctrine, statute and common law, individual offences and general principles. Together, the essays explore common themes, including the scope of criminal law and criminalisation, the role of the jury, and the causes of change in criminal law.