Coleridge’s Laws

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is best known as a great poet and literary theorist, but for one, quite short, period of his life he held real political power – acting as Public Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner in Malta in 1805. This was a formative experience for Coleridge which he later identified as being one of the most instructive in his entire life. In this volume Barry Hough and Howard Davis show how Coleridge’s actions whilst in a position of power differ markedly from the idealism he had advocated before taking office – shedding new light on Coleridge’s sense of political and legal morality.To Mary and to Stella Barry Hough was formerly Professor in English Law at Bournemouth University and is now at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of numerous articles in the field of Constitutional and Administrative law and Employment law and of the leading monograph Street Trading and Markets and Fairs (Boston, UK, 1994). Barry Hough is also a contributor to four editions of J. Alder, Constitutional and Administrative Law (Basingstoke and New York) and to William Blake Odgers (ed.), High Court Pleading & Practice (London, 1991). Howard Davis is Reader in Public Law at Bournemouth University. As well as law and literature his other research and teaching interests relate to constitutional law and human rights, in particular the reception of European human rights law through the Human Rights Act 1998. His textbook, Human Rights Law Directions (Oxford, 2009) is now in its second édition. Michael John Kooy is Associate Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick University. His main research interests lie in British and European Romanticism, especially Coleridge, and in the relationship between philosophy and literature. Kooy is the author of Coleridge, Schiller and Aesthetic Education (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and he is currently completing a book called Coleridge and War, which assesses Coleridge’s wartime activities as a journalist and poet in relation to his political theology. Lydia Davis took her degree in Latin and Ancient History at Edinburgh University. Her PhD on British Travellers and the Rediscovery of Sicily, 16th- 19th Centuries was awarded in 2006. She has lived and studied in Rome and Sicily. She currently works for Hansard at the House of Commons