Best Selling Books by Ian Ward

Ian Ward places contemporary political and jurisprudential responses to terrorism within a broader literary, cultural and historical context.

Introduction to Critical Legal Theory provides an accessible introduction to the study of law and legal theory. It covers all the seminal movements in classical, modern and postmodern legal thought, engaging the reader with the ideas of jurists as diverse as Aristotle, Hobbes and Kant, Marx, Foucault and Dworkin. At the same time, it impresses the interdisciplinary nature of critical legal thought, introducing the reader to the philosophy, the economics and the politics of law. This new edition focuses even more intently upon the narrative aspect of critical legal thinking and the re-emergence of a distinctive legal humanism, as well as the various related challenges posed by our ''new'' world order. Introduction to Critical Theory is a comprehensive text for both students and teachers of legal theory, jurisprudence and related subjects.

Chin Peng joined the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) in January, 1940, as a 15 year-old schoolboy. His commitment to the communist cause, the pre-war anti-colonial struggle against Britain and, eventually, guerrilla warfare against the Japanese invaders saw him propelled rapidly to senior positions within the CPM party structure. By the age of 18 he had become the key link between the communists'' Malayan Peoples Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) and Britain''s clandestine Force 136, then endeavouring to set up intelligence-gathering operations behind enemy lines. While still a teenager he was promoted to head the communist movement''s activities in his home state of Perak. Immediately following the Japanese surrender, Chin Peng was appointed to the Central Committee and, ultimately, his party''s policy-making Politburo. He was barely 21, At 23, he was formally named the CPM''s Secretary General, its highest-ranking figure. By June, 1948, the Malayan Emergency erupted and Chin Peng, four months shy of his 24th year, became the British Empire''s most wanted man.

This book charts the writing of the English constitution through the work of four of the most influential jurists in the history of English constitutional thought—Edmund Burke, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Walter Bagehot and Albert Venn Dicey. Stretching from the French Revolution to the death of Queen Victoria, their writing is both representative of and formative to the Victorian constitution. Ian Ward traces how constitutional writing changed over the course of the long nineteenth century, from the poetics of Burke and the romance of Macaulay, to the pragmatism of Bagehot and the jurisprudence of Dicey. A century on, our perception of the English constitution is still shaped by this contested history.

The first book to investigate the place of law in modern and contemporary dramaIllustrates the role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audienceAnalyses a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including historical, poetic, realist, documentary and ''in-yer-face''Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law alongside the work of a particular contemporary playwright Shows how modern playwrights engage with issues such as pornography, murder, terrorism, the function of Parliament, and the role of the monarchyTheatre, according to the prominent British playwright David Hare, is our most effective ''court of justice''. This book assesses the credibility of this arresting claim in the immediate context of contemporary British theatre by investigating the place and purpose of law in a range of modern dramatic settings and writings. Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law and the work of a particular contemporary playwright, and in doing so illustrates the important role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience. Exploring a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including the historical, the poetic, realist, documentary and ''in-yer-face'', this volume explores the capacity of modern playwrights to engage with issues such as pornography, murder, the contemporary experience of terrorism, the function of Parliament and the role of the monarchy.

One of the iconic moments in English history, the trial and execution of King Charles I has yet to be studied in-depth from a contemporary legal perspective. Professor Ian Ward brings his considerable legal and historical acumen to bear on the particular constitutional issues raised by the regicide of Charles, and not only analyses the unfolding of events and their immediate historical context, but also draws out their wider importance and legacy for the generations of historians, politicians, and writers over the ensuing three and a half centuries. This is a book about constitutional history and thought, but also about the writing of constitutional history and thought and the forms they have taken -whether as scholarship, polemics, or literary experiments - in collective British memory. Chapters range from the events leading up to and through the trial and execution of Charles; to their theatricality, legality, and constitutionality; to the political writings such as Milton''s Tenure of Kings and Hobbes'' Leviathan that followed; and finally trace the various subsequent histories and trials of Charles I that presented him either as martyr, Tory or -- in the 18th and 19th centuries -- the Whig.

This book presents a fresh approach to the writing of legal history as an essentially textual enterprise. It argues that to write any history is to tell a story. In doing so, it appreciates the place not just of context and contingency in the history of law but also of humanity. Law is a human creation, for which reason it accommodates both reason and romance. Absent sensibility, it makes no sense. This book accordingly tells four stories about law. A first revisits a familiar institution, the English monarchy. A second reads history through the lens of a particular author, Daniel Defoe. A third writes a history of a few hundred yards of Bristol, eighteenth-century England’s premier slave-port. A fourth investigates a peculiar, and hideous, fantasy. Engaging texts drawn from literature, philosophy, and politics, as well as law, this work will appeal to any scholar or student interested not just in the past of law but also in its imagining and inscription.

This book discusses the history and institutional framework of the EU without becoming mired in the minutiae of ''black letter'' law. It provides an accessible introduction for students to current critical academic commentary on European law.

This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare''s plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare''s work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.

English Legal Histories is an exciting and innovative approach to the study of English law. Written in an accessible style intended for students as well as a broader audience, it takes the reader beyond the narrower confines of legal doctrines and cases, and invites them to consider the myriad contexts within which English law has been shaped: the politics, the economics, the art, the poetry. Reaching from the Reformation through to the age of Reform, it tells stories, the ''histories'', of English law. Histories of the constitution and government, of crime and contracts, tort and trespass, property and equity. Of the people who made that law, those who wrote it, and those who suffered it. For it is in the end a human story, of justice and injustice, of success and failure, good luck and bad. The law is full of statutes and instruments, cases and precedent, but its history is full of people and peculiarity. Which is what, of course, makes it so endlessly fascinating.

The emergence of an interdisciplinary study of law and literature is one of the most exciting theoretical developments taking place in North America and Britain. In Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives Ian Ward explores the educative ambitions of the law and literature movement, and its already established critical, ethical and political potential. He reveals the law in literature, and the literature of law, in key areas of literature, from Shakespeare to Beatrix Potter to Umberto Eco, and from feminist literature to children''s literature to the modern novel, drawing out the interaction between rape law and The Handmaid''s Tale, and the psychology of English property law and The Tale of Peter Rabbit. This original book defines the developing state of law and literature studies, and demonstrates how the theory of law and literature can illuminate the literary text.

This title was first published in 2003.Justice, Humanity and the New World Order offers a refreshing analysis of current jurisprudential concerns regarding the new world order , by examining them in the intellectual context of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment. After setting the historical context, the author investigates aspects of Enlightenment political culture as well as aspects of the new world order , including international relations, the European Union and human rights. In conclusion, the author introduces the concept of a new humanism , which he suggests, drawing on certain aspects of Enlightenment political philosophy, can complement the new world order .

This book aims to provide a stimulating text for both academics and students; advancing a series of original ideas about the English constitution.

By analysing relevant statues alongside the literature of the time, Ian Ward investigates Victorian anxieties about the ''condition'' of its women, concentrating in particular on four ''crimes'': adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution.

Provides a fresh account of one of the defining judicial engagements in English legal history.

The Margins of European Law attempts to provide a critical and sceptical approach to European law. The related themes of the book attempt to introduce a historical and theoretical context for European law. Ultimately, it is suggested that the new European order requires a very different legal and jurisprudential approach; one which is distinctively post-modern. European Community law, at its margins, is a mass of inconsistencies and injustices, and a post-modern model can better effect the erasing of the margins of European law.

This book is one of several highly revealing historical subjects researched and written by husband and- wife collaborative authors, Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor. Since its initial publication, Slaughter and Deception at Batang Kali has spearheaded a quite relentless legal pursuit for justice. This will be reaching its climax within the next few months. The book has so far been central to evidence presented at two previous British High Court hearings. At the conclusion of this second session in High Court in May 2012, the presiding judges finally proclaimed there was indeed a case to answer. The Batang Kali massacre now moves to the Supreme Court in London where once again Slaughter and Deception at Batang Kali will figure as a key factor of evidence.