John Hostettler | |
---|---|
Born | May 1925 West London, England |
Died | 23 October 2018 Rustington, West Sussex, England |
Occupation | Solicitor retired and writer |
Genre | Legal history, biography |
John Hostettler (1925-2018) was an English writer of legal histories and biographies. [1]
His best-known creation, Sir William Garrow was used in the making of the BBC drama series, Garrow's Law .
Hostettler was born in Central Middlesex Hospital and grew up in Acton, West London, with a younger sister Doreen. His father, John Christian, was a fireman and then locomotive engine driver for the Great Western Railway. His mother, Violet, had started work at age thirteen on a milk round. They had married in 1923.
He passed the 11+ exam, attended Acton County School and then became articled to solicitors in Holborn, London. During the Second World War, he volunteered, in 1943, as a Bevin Boy and remained in the South Wales Coalfield for three years.
Hostettler qualified as a solicitor in September 1947 and remained a lawyer for thirty-five years. [2] He established his own practice in West London in 1958 and had offices in Ealing, Southall and Covent Garden during his career. He also undertook political and civil liberties cases in Nigeria, Germany and Aden, and played a key role in the abolition of flogging in colonial prisons following a visit to the latter in 1962. [3] He sat as a magistrate from 1976 and also chaired social security appeals tribunals after he retired as a solicitor. [4]
He holds an LL.B. (Hons), an LL.M. and a PhD from the London School of Economics and 2 PhDs from Sussex University. [5] [6]
Hostettler has written twenty five books on legal history; current issues such as breaches of the rule of law and trial by jury; and biographies. His literary career began in 1992 when he transformed his first PhD thesis into the book, "The Politics of Criminal Law Reform in the Nineteenth Century." [7] His biographical subjects include leading legal figures Sir Matthew Hale, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, [8] Sir Edward Carson, [9] Lord Halsbury, Thomas Erskine [10] and William Garrow ( the latter co-written with Richard Braby, a descendant of Garrow.)
His legal history books include histories of criminal justice [11] [12] and the abolition of capital punishment. He has also written about voting in Britain (with Brian Block.) [13] and he was nominated for the Orwell Prize in 2013 for “Dissenters, Radicals, Heretics and Blasphemers.” [14]
Hostettler has also written articles for The Anglo-American Law Review, Justice of the Peace and The Legal Executive. [15]
Hostettler married Joy Birch in February 1950 in North West London and they had 3 children. They lived on the coast in West Sussex, although he continued to support Arsenal Football Club. Hostettler died in his sleep at his West Sussex home on 23 October 2018.[ citation needed ] He was 93.
The Petition of Right, passed on 7 June 1628, is an English constitutional document setting out specific individual protections against the state, reportedly of equal value to Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689. It was part of a wider conflict between Parliament and the Stuart monarchy that led to the 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, ultimately resolved in the 1688-89 Glorious Revolution.
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio was an Italian criminologist, jurist, philosopher, economist and politician, who is widely considered one of the greatest thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment. He is well remembered for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology and the Classical School of criminology. Beccaria is considered the father of modern criminal law and the father of criminal justice.
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William Calcraft was a 19th-century English hangman, one of the most prolific of British executioners. It is estimated in his 45-year career he carried out 450 executions. A cobbler by trade, Calcraft was initially recruited to flog juvenile offenders held in Newgate Prison. While selling meat pies on streets around the prison, Calcraft met the City of London's hangman, John Foxton.
To be hanged, drawn and quartered became a statutory penalty for men convicted of high treason in the Kingdom of England from 1352 under King Edward III (1327–1377), although similar rituals are recorded during the reign of King Henry III (1216–1272). The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn behind a horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged, emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. His remains would then often be displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge, to serve as a warning of the fate of traitors. For reasons of public decency, women convicted of high treason were instead burned at the stake.
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The Trial of Lord George Gordon for high treason occurred on 5 February 1781 before Lord Mansfield in the Court of King's Bench, as a result of Gordon's role in the riots named after him. Gordon, President of the Protestant Association, had led a protest against the Papists Act 1778, a Catholic Emancipation bill. Intending only to hand in a petition to Parliament, Gordon riled the crowd by postponing of the petition, denouncing Members of Parliament and launching "anti-Catholic harangues". The crowd of protesters fragmented and began looting nearby buildings; by the time the riots had finished a week later, 300 had died. Gordon was almost immediately arrested, and indicted for levying war against the King.
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