Criminal trial procedure in eighteenth-century England: the impact of lawyers

John Langbein’s work on the English criminal trial, culminating in The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, has generally transformed our understanding of how the modern Anglo-American ‘lawyerized’ procedure came about. But for a social historian like me, who is interested in the rise and rise of the lawyers and other quasi-ministerial professionals from the sixteenth century, his work also forms a crucial chapter in the long story of professionalization in law and governance, and the effective marginalization of lay people