The writ of habeas corpus has long been seen as a legal instrument that guaranteed the liberty of the individual, developed in partnership with the rise of parliamentary sovereignty, and protected subjects from arbitrary royal rule. In challenging each of these commonly held assumptions, Paul Halliday's book is an important work of revisionist history. Halliday's study is successful because he has deliberately chosen not to follow the traditional mythology of habeas corpus nor to analyze the history of the writ using anachronistic liberal language. Instead, his study is founded on a quadrennial survey of the records of the court of King's Bench, under whose authority the writ was created and actioned. Searching between 1500 and 1800, Halliday has discovered 2,757 uses of the writ, which suggests that it was used more than 11,000 times over the course of the 300 years addressed by the study. This rigorous empirical approach allows Halliday to make a case for the importance of habeas corpus as it was used in practice and historical context, rather than how it has been mythologized as “the great writ of liberty.”

In nine thematic chapters, Halliday tells the complex and fascinating story of the writ. He finds its incipient origins in clause 39 of Magna Carta but also suggests that many other late-medieval precedents were used to develop the writ that ultimately reached final form in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Here, and throughout the book, famous English lawyers become central to the discussion: Sir John Popham, Sir Thomas Fleming, and Sir Edward Coke, successive chief justices of the King's Bench, played a vital role in defining the purpose and exercise of habeas corpus. Their interests were not to protect the right of liberty but rather to ensure that wrongs committed against the king's subjects were corrected, a subtle but crucial difference that emphasizes the source of authority for the writ. In what is perhaps the most important argument in the book, and in line with recent studies, Halliday explains that the writ of habeas corpus was issued on behalf of the royal prerogative, in this case the king's responsibility to ensure that no person under his authority was wrongly imprisoned, either because there was no evidence against the prisoner or because the law had been incorrectly interpreted or applied by lesser authorities. Functioning as an equitable instrument of the crown, habeas corpus was used to correct wrongs such as the detainment of a woman who laughed in church, a man believed to be insane, and a wife held in close custody by her husband, only a few of the many case studies that inform Halliday's arguments. More serious incidents involved mass military impressments, slavery, and the detainment of prisoners of war, which also shows the writ's relevance to aliens living under English protection. Halliday demonstrates that upward of three-quarters of prisoners who accessed the writ were successful in securing their release, particularly those individuals who had been deprived of their liberty as the result of civil or nonfelony criminal offenses, in which they would normally have been bailed not jailed. Importantly, and as the subtitle of the book reveals, because the writ was a prerogative one, it ran in all of the king's dominions. Halliday argues that “more than any other part of the law, habeas corpus threatened to make one legal zone—the empire—out of what was otherwise a legally polyglot gaggle of dominions” (35). Habeas corpus was used from Quebec to Wales to Calcutta to review the detainment of the king's subjects. It thereafter became a central aspect of post-imperial constitutions.

The focus on the prerogative force of the writ has led to another key argument: that parliament, rather than being a partner in the development of habeas corpus and the protection of liberty, in fact undermined the court's ability to use the writ effectively. Partly in an effort to defend its own right to imprison those whom it found in contempt, in the early Stuart period parliament developed a series of legislation that was intended to ensure that its supremacy was respected by the king, council, and courts. The most famous of these were the Petition of Right (1628) and the Star Chamber Act (1641), in which parliament sought both to modify judicial supervision of imprisonment and to limit the king's and council's right to imprison. To many modern historians, this has been (Whiggishly) seen as part of a process that placed matters of liberty into the hands of a representative body; to Halliday, it reflected parliament's desire to establish itself as the highest legal authority. If parliament could determine who could imprison and who could review imprisonment, did that mean that the “high court of parliament” was above King's Bench, and that parliament's own imprisonment orders, therefore, were not subject to judicial review? Halliday cites a number of cases, perhaps the most famous being that of John Lillburne, in which parliament refused to answer habeas corpus writs issued by King's Bench. Halliday also demonstrates that the Habeas Corpus Act (1679)—celebrated in coffeehouses and popular political discourse as a great liberal innovation—in fact offered no major innovations and instead merely gave legislative voice to procedures that had been ongoing for generations. Its issuance also enabled parliament to suspend habeas corpus at times of war or civil unrest, common occurrences in the century after 1689, a further obstacle for the judicial bench.

Halliday is an engaging writer, which makes this study of an English legal writ—in lesser hands, a dry and arcane topic—both genuinely interesting to read and of considerable modern relevance. Indeed, a short review can hardly give justice to the nuance and sensitivity demonstrated by Halliday in this wide-ranging, expertly researched, and intellectually stimulating book. It will become a classic in English and American legal, political, and constitutional history.