Douglas Hay, co-author of the renowned
Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, and author of many other works, has posted
Writing About the Death Penalty. It is an essay in response to commentary of other scholars on Hay's contribution to that collection: '
Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law' (1975). The essay appeared in
Legal History, Vol. 10, No's. 1-2, pp. 13-52, 200. Hay is at Osgoode Hall Law School and Dept of History, York University. Here's the short abstract:
A retrospective look at 'Property, Authority, and the Criminal Law' (1975), Douglas Hay's analysis of eighteenth-century English criminal law, by the author, responding to comments by John Beattie, Jim Phillips, and James Muir in a symposium 'thirty years after'. It includes an analysis of recent scholarship on capital punishment and the use of executive pardons in the eighteenth century.
