The Social History of Legal Responses to Infectious Disease

About the conference

Legal responses to infectious disease have recently been at the forefront of public health policy debates, but the issues raised by epidemics are not new and a better understanding of the effects of legal measures can be gained from a study of historical precedents. Studying the social history of legal responses to disease also reveals much about the evolution of social and political attitudes, the evolution of legal doctrine, and the interaction between social, political and legal change. Legal historians, political historians and social historians of medicine have worked on these topics but have not always looked outside their specialist areas and this inter-disciplinary event aims to bring them together. The focus of the discussion will be on Great Britain, the British Empire and the Commonwealth, starting in the medieval period and continuing into the twentieth century.

Conference themes: Social crises are agents of legal as well as social change. Legal as well as social responses to infectious disease, especially during epidemics, are a well-known example. Laws responding to infectious disease are affected by medical and scientific understandings of diseases, their causes and treatment. The causal flow also goes the other way: medical and therapeutic practice is affected by legal constructs of personhood (slaves and non-slaves, children and adults) and of what counts as ‘medical and therapeutic practice’.

Different types of law work in different ways, making them more or less suitable vehicles to implement policies responding to differently conceived problems, e.g. short-term solutions focussed on individuals (quarantine), long-term solutions focussed on individuals or urban infrastructure (immigration controls, vaccination programmes, building standards, sewage systems), coercive or enabling solutions, solutions which do or do not require public spending.

This all leads into questions about the role played by law as a tool for public health policy implementation, such as:

• whether different types of legal response to infectious disease make a measurable difference – little epidemiological research has been done to measure this even in modern times and data from earlier periods is crude;
• whether successes can be attributed not only to medical expertise but also to policymaking and lawmaking expertise, to answer which it is necessary to consider how good ‘governance’ should be conceived and measured;
• whether failures can be attributed to technical failures by lawmakers, e.g. picking the wrong type of rule to implement a policy, or poor drafting of rules which are then misunderstood by those to whom they apply, or inept use of existing rules which are a poor fit for a new situation, or inept transplantation of laws from one jurisdiction to another;
• whether legal responses to infectious disease alter or perpetuate existing legal structures and whether they alter or perpetuate existing social and political norms, e.g. because law is used as a tool of imperial control, endorses and reinforces racial constructs, and/or exacerbates tensions between imperial rulers and ruled; and/or because law perpetuates the stigmatisation, scapegoating and othering of social groups, including victims of particular diseases, immigrants and racial minorities, the unemployed poor, gay men and other LGBQT+ people, and members of particular professions e.g. seamen and prostitutes; and/or because epidemics can promote social solidarity as well as social conflict, and because law can also pull in this direction, e.g. by ‘individualist’ outlawing of discriminatory acts and/or macrosocial responses to structural social inequalities and by signalling that public health problems are not generated by any particular social group and that solutions lie in lawmaking that applies to all.

Laws constraining individual freedoms for the common good are controversial and coercive laws responding to infectious disease are no exception. The historical record suggests that policymakers and lawmakers are not always alive to this concern, and that even when they are, they often enact coercive laws anyway. This also prompts questions, including:

• whether policymakers and lawmakers always put the same considerations in the balance and weigh them off in the same way; and how their decisions, and the implementation of these decisions through law, affect general social attitudes regarding the costs and benefits of individualism and collectivism, civil liberties and state power;
• given that administrative initiatives have a general tendency towards mission creep and increase of state power, and given that laws have a general tendency to stay in place after the reasons for their creation have gone, and/or after they are proved to have had negative rather than positive effects, and/or after they are seen to be ill-adapted to new cases, whether the administrative and legal responses to infectious disease have displayed these tendencies.

Legal responses to disease are not limited to state regulatory measures: evolving conceptions of disease and their causes can also affect the rules of private law, i.e. the laws governing relationships between private individuals such as tortious liability for harms – prompting further questions about fitness for purpose and justification.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Mark Bailey, University of East Anglia
• Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales, Sydney
• Roberta Bivins, Warwick
• Alex Chase-Levenson, Binghamton University
• Tom Crook, Oxford Brookes University
• Manikarnika Dutta, University of Bristol
• Lorren Eldridge, University of Edinburgh
• Jonathan Garton, Warwick
• Colm McGrath, Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London
• Noga Mora-Levine, Michigan State University College of Law
• Charles Mitchell, UCL
• Joe Sampson, Cambridge
• Christopher Szabla, Durham University
• Chantal Stebbings, University of Exeter
• Katherine D Watson, Oxford Brookes University
• Janet Weston, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Session Timings:
Day 1 - 10:00 - 17:45 (registration from 09:30)
Day 2 - 10:00 - 15:45 (registration from 09:30)

The Programme

FRIDAY 22 SEPTEMBER

SATURDAY 23 SEPTEMBER

Confirmed Speakers, Working Titles and Abstracts

Mark Bailey, University of East Anglia
The Implementation of National Labour Legislation in England after the Black Death, 1349 to 1400
The English government introduced the Ordinance (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351) as an immediate response to the loss of half the population through the first epidemic of the Black Death. This unprecedented, ambitious and monumental act of state intervention has been described as ‘a spectacular expansion in the domain of statute law, bringing within its purview, first, wages and prices, but then, by extension, a whole range of other economic and social arrangements’. The rationale for this intervention, its effectiveness, its gendered impact, and its political ramifications have all received a good deal of scholarly attention. The paper will summarise briefly for the benefit of the non-specialist the broad historical approaches to the labour legislation, then will consider in more detail two specific—and hitherto under-researched—aspects of the legislation. The first is its novelty, challenging the widespread belief that village communities had routinely regulated the hired labour market before 1348-9 in ways that anticipated the provisions of the Statute of 1351. The second is the extent to which the legislation was adopted outside the formal mechanisms of state law, i.e. in non-government tribunals—notably borough and manorial courts—and private plaints in the court of common pleas.  

Manikarnika Dutta, University of Bristol
India’s covid crisis: Legal and Social Responses to the management of the dead of covid-19 victims
Municipal governments in India have faced serious challenges in the effective management, dignified disposal, and care for the dead during unforeseen crises such as natural disasters and disease/epidemic outbreaks. Managing and disposing the corpse has remained a serious concern  since the time of the cholera and plague epidemics and famines under British colonial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries until the recent Covid-19 pandemic. A massive scandal shook the country in 2020-21 as the global media highlighted the municipal government’s inability to disposing the corpses of covid-19 victims in ethically and ritualistically acceptable manners. Horrifying images of charred, bloated, decomposed, discarded bodies, accompanied by the fear of contagious corpses and the lack of space for cremation and burial, challenged the public’s perception of a ‘good death’. The media reports, visual images, and live videos of the mismanagement of diseased bodies came under severe national and international scrutiny. One of the ideological battlegrounds for dignified death was the Article 21 of the Indian constitution, which arguably guaranteed not only the right to life, fair treatment and dignity to the living, but also to the dead. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) was asked to consider a special legislation providing guidelines to uphold the dignity and rights of the dead. This paper will analyse this critical context that encompassed constitutional and legal frameworks, legal preparedness, and social responses to body disposal during a global health emergency from an infectious disease. It will discuss the wider conversations around contagion, risk management, public health, sanitation, hygiene, and environmental factors. In doing so, it will connect historical and contemporary issues concerning the social, political, cultural, economic, ethical and legal challenges of administering the infectious dead.

Lorren Eldridge, University of Edinburgh
Centralisation of Labour Regulation in Response to the Black Death: The Statute of Labourers and Contract Law
The mortality caused by the Black Death in England led to a shortage of labour available to manorial lords. Labourers were empowered to demand better working conditions, especially during the harvest period, and could express dissatisfaction through geographical mobility. The government responded rapidly with a centralised attempt to regulate labour in the form of the Ordinance (1349) and Statute of Labourers (1351). At a time when the common law action of covenant was becoming moribund due to over-strict formalities, this legislation created a centrally prescribed form of labour contract which very swiftly developed its own common law enforcement mechanism - an exceptional approach which cut across both emerging procedural forms in debt, covenant, and trespass and the established jurisdictional boundaries in customary and common law. This paper will explore how the Statute of Labourers created this particular form, and its significance in the history of the common law of contract.

Joe Sampson, Cambridge
Legal responses to the plague in early seventeenth-century London
Elizabeth I died in the early hours of 24 March 1603. Her health having taken a deleterious turn in the preceding months, the identification of her successor in James VI of Scotland had already taken place, and the proclamation was issued that same day. Approximately two weeks later on 5 April later the new king began the long trip from Edinburgh. He would not arrive in London until 7 May, with his coronation following two months later on 25 July. The same period of four months saw a resurgence of plague strike London. The aptly named Bills of Mortality began to be republished after several year in abeyance in the week ending 17 March 1603, a week before the passing of Elizabeth. That week saw a relatively high number of deaths in the City of London and its Liberties, with 108 recorded. The following week this dropped to 60, with numbers hovering between 60 and 80 per week for the following month. Of these, an average of four per week were attributed to the plague. By the week of James I's coronation, the number of deaths in the City and Liberties had climbed to 1312, of which 1025 were attributed to the plague. By mid-August this figure had doubled, and remained in the mid-2000s per week for over a month. The numbers remained in the hundreds until late in the year, before finally coming down to double digits by December.
 
The advent of the plague in London did not escape the notice of the new monarch and his advisers even as he continued his journey south. This paper traces three sets of responses. The first examines efforts to contain the spread of the pestilence, and the social insights that can be gleaned from such measures. The second comprises emergency powers granted to the Privy Council as fatalities neared their peak, powers themselves modelled on those deployed in response to earlier pandemics. The third focuses on a subsequent enactment by Parliament in 1604, which sought both to authorise measures beyond those possible under the emergency powers, and to put the legislature at the fore of the national response to the plague.

Noga Mora-Levine, Michigan State University College of Law
England’s Missing Boards of Health: The Medieval Beginnings of an Anglo-Continental Divergence on Governance in Times of Epidemics
Starting with the Black Death, the Italian City States delegated extensive regulatory powers in times of plague to extraordinary magistracies, or ‘boards of health’. The boards oversaw the removal of polluting trades and other sources of miasmas and enforced quarantine measures directed at both people and goods. Initially granted temporary emergency powers, the Italian boards evolved into permanent administrative bodies during the 15th century. Inherent to this administrative model was the wielding of broad discretion regarding the nature and scope of necessary health measures and a jurisdiction that extended into most domestic and commercial realms. By the later 1500s, France, Spain and other continental countries had followed Italy’s example. Not so, however, England, where proposals to establish boards of health failed on different occasions during both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until the 1800s that boards of health (far weaker than their continental counterparts) were first established in Britain, most famously by Edwin Chadwick under the Public Health Act of 1848. Even then, the constitutionality of this institution remained in sharp dispute, as the history of Chadwick’s short-lived board exemplifies. The paper will argue that the beginnings of this Anglo-Continental divergence may be traced as far back as 1368 when, with the plague returning to London for the third time, Edward III (departing from the practice of Edward I) failed to appoint an extraordinary commission in response to sanitary complaints against filth generated by the City’s butchers. Behind this decision, the article will argue, was the ascendance of an emerging alternative model of governance to that of royal commissions in the form of the Justices of the Peace.

Charles Mitchell, UCL, and Jonathan Garton, Warwick
Property Disputes Concerning Leper Houses, Pest Houses and Fever Hospitals
During the long period covered by the paper (c 1100-1900) many institutions were founded for the infectious sick. Obviously enough, many social and legal changes occurred during this period, but certain legal issues came up time and again in connection with these institutions. This is because they had some common features: their activities took place within physical structures and they were intended by their founders to continue for long periods. As a practical matter, property rights in the relevant structures were therefore needed, and in many cases additional property was also needed to supply an income out of which the institutions’ activities could be funded. Some legal questions therefore recurred: for how long could a property-owner stipulate that the property must be used only for a particular purpose; should it matter that the public would derive a benefit from implementation of this purpose; who could be charged with implementing the purpose; what should happen if the purpose became redundant; what should happen if pursuit of the purpose compromised the enjoyment which other property-owners took from their own property? The answers given by lawmakers to these questions created new law, which created a new context within which property-holding arrangements were made to support institutions by succeeding generations of founders – an iterative process that generated social and legal change.

Alex Chase-Levenson, Binghamton University
Epidemics, Quarantine Law, and Border Policy, 1780-1850
By the turn of the nineteenth century, ‘the quarantine laws’ had come to be seen as a collective set of policies applied in various Western European countries that were simultaneously domestically enacted and internationally guaranteed. This paper will consider the jurisdictional complexities of the quarantine spaces those laws mandated alongside broader evolving forms of border regulation. It will demonstrate the extent to which epidemic anxiety and diplomatic custom led the late Georgian and early Victorian British state to concede a central role to rival Continental powers in the regulation of borders.

Christopher Szabla, Durham University
Quarantine and Travel Restrictions in Colonial Asia: Difference and Disease through the Lens of Hong Kong  
The notion of ‘colonial difference’ has often at least implicitly been an important component of examinations of colonial disease control, suggesting the adoption of distinctive colonial legal and medical approaches vis-à-vis those in European societies on the basis of cultural or biological dissimilarities. This paper investigates this concept with respect to inbound travel restrictions – particularly quarantine – in Hong Kong and, by extension, other ports to which it was connected in colonial Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries. In part because of European perceptions that Asian ports were less ‘sanitary,’ Hong Kong applied more stringent quarantine and travel measures rather than strictly following British standards. Yet Hong Kong and other Asian ports also eventually adopted the largely Europe-focused International Sanitary Conventions’ standards on quarantine and travel restriction, contradicting the position that Asian ports required exceptional measures. At the same time, Hong Kong’s individual assessments of other ports’ ‘infectedness’ – and, hence, the need to subject travellers from them to quarantine – demonstrate differing levels of trust in different, particularly non-British, colonial administrations. The paper will seek to explain these phenomena by nuancing the concept of ‘colonial difference’ through the lens of travel restrictions, incorporating the influence of commercial factors and lobbying as well as notions of ‘difference’ as between colonial governments.  

Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Revisiting ‘Disease’ in Colonial Immigration Acts, c 1880-1930
In the great upswing of immigration regulation from the middle of the nineteenth century almost every colonial immigration or aliens statute included a disease clause. The Colonial Office was required to adjudicate the bills and was typically reluctant to endorse any mechanism for the regulation of free movement. This paper examines its consideration of the disease clauses that were increasingly underwriting the immigration bills presented by the self-governing colonies.

Chantal Stebbings, University of Exeter
The Taxation of Proprietary Medicines and the Regulation of Poisons in Nineteenth-Century England
The use of proprietary or ‘quack’ medicines was widespread in nineteenth-century Britain, when infectious diseases were endemic and frequently epidemic. Many of these medicines used for self-medication against infectious diseases were both dangerous and addictive, and yet their place in the developing regime for the regulation of poisons was significantly weakened through a widespread misunderstanding of a tax to which they were subject.  First,  the revenue stamp they bore as the external manifestation of the payment of tax to which they were liable encouraged their use by giving them an apparent, though spurious, respectability. Secondly, the tax legislation was used to import an inaccurate definition in an exemption to poisons control which allowed toxic proprietary medicines to escape all legislative control. The widespread and profound misunderstanding of the medicine stamp duty, and its effect on the sale of proprietary medicines containing poisons, forms the subject of this paper. It reveals tensions between cultural perceptions of safety and efficacy, scientific and medical knowledge, vested interests, and a growing realisation that the legal control of poisons was essential. It assesses the extent to which the prevalence of self-medication in the second half of the nineteenth century acted as an engine for legal changes in the law of tax and of the regulation of poisons.

Tom Crook, Oxford Brookes University
On the Limits of the Law: Official Authority, Public Trust and the Prevention of Infectious Diseases in Britain, c 1850–1910
Understood as an administrative enterprise, public health during the Victorian period was fundamentally concerned to prevent infectious diseases: the so-called ‘zymotic’ diseases, which were thought to be peculiarly susceptible to, and in need of, collective action. Legislating was crucial, furnishing the statutory powers via which local authorities—to put it crudely—developed two kinds of infrastructure after roughly 1850: sanitary infrastructures (e.g. water supply and sewerage systems) and medical infrastructures focused on individual persons (e.g. smallpox vaccination and hospital isolation systems). Yet, as this paper suggests, the role of the law requires careful specification. The opening section of the paper offers a brief overview of how the law—statute law in particular—and legal and quasi-legal processes featured in the making of Victorian public health, foregrounding the confused and contested gestation of public health statutes and drawing a broad distinction between those acts, or clauses of acts, that enabled and those that compelled. The remaining sections focus on the day-to-day application of the law by local officials equipped, in theory, with powers of compulsion. Three areas are discussed: the notification and isolation of the sick and infected; the sanitary inspection of homes; and the vaccination of the young. All three areas were beset by problems, including a lack of manpower, and it was widely acknowledged that resort to legal proceedings (normally via magistrates) constituted a failure, not least because it was so time-consuming and costly. Securing the trust and co-operation of the public was crucial; and ultimately, in the case of smallpox vaccination, where public opposition was sufficiently entrenched and articulate, legal compulsion had to give way in 1898 to a modified regime that permitted exemption on the (legally certified) grounds of ‘conscientious objection’. In practice, the law was only one resource among many. The threat of compulsion no doubt helped matters, but even this had its limits. When it came to preventing infectious diseases, laws were only really effective when they assumed the form of bureaucratic efficiency and persuasive, public diplomacy on the part of officials.

Katherine D Watson, Oxford Brookes University
Private Offence, Public Wrong: Prosecuting Disease Transmission by Medical Professionals in Nineteenth-Century England
Legal and historical accounts of Victorian cases in which the transmission of disease formed the basis for criminal prosecution have tended to focus on the communication of venereal disease – either by prostitutes, within marriage, or as a result of sexual assault. This paper adopts a different focus: it considers cases in which medical practitioners – doctors and midwives – were charged with assault after infecting their patients with a disease which they knew they had contracted. The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 opened up new options for prosecution but coincided with a growing focus on public health reforms aimed at the control of cholera and tuberculosis. The paper therefore seeks to illuminate the public, legal and medical discourses that surrounded such prosecutions, prior to the calls for further legal reform made in the wake of the Clarence decision of 1888.

Colm McGrath, Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London
Nosocomial Infection, Liability and Medical Authority in England and Canada
As modern, institutional healthcare emerged across the Commonwealth, patients whose personal health challenges were previously separated from one another became centralised in the geography of the hospital. This paper considers legal responses in Canada and England up to the mid-twentieth century to the problems raised by treating those suffering from infectious diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis alongside other cohorts of patients. Claims amongst the latter for resulting nosocomial infections provided a forum where reliance on settled medical authority came in tension with competing interpretations of patient safety. Equally, such claims provided an inflection point for claimants to unsettle the traditional architecture of healthcare liability by focusing directly on the institution itself. In assessing how each system responded to these issues key roles were played by how such infectious diseases were understood at all; the relevance of collective interests in healthcare; and whether and to what extent such claims permitted greater scrutiny of medical decision making by the courts.

Roberta Bivins, Warwick
Old Laws, New Treatments? Responding to Dis-ease at the UK Border
Covid has exposed the intersecting legal and biomedical challenges that inhere to managing infectious diseases -- and related social dis-ease about human mobility -- in a highly connected and deeply globalised world. But these challenges are not novel either to the law or to biomedicine. Using the examples of smallpox, tuberculosis, and the genetic profiling of family reunification migrants, I will explore the impacts of laws intended to control disease importation at the UK's borders across the twentieth century. Mapping continuities as well as disruptions in understandings and practices of medical border control, I will ask how, when, and why laws addressing the importation of infectious diseases are enacted, and how they are subsequently used to address both biomedical and cultural 'dis-ease'.

Janet Weston, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Ethics and 20th Century Public Health Law in Britain
This paper will address the role of ethics in the history of legal responses to infectious disease. ‘Public health ethics’ as a discipline first emerged in the early 2000s in Britain, but interest in morality, justice, and fairness has been a long-standing feature of debate surrounding legal intervention to tackle disease - from ‘venereal disease’ regulation to Covid-19 controls. Looking at two contrasting historical case studies, tuberculosis in the first half of the twentieth century and HIV/AIDS towards the end of the century, I will consider how law-makers identified and weighed questions of (un)fairness and (in)justice when considering legal measures, and what this might tell us about the shifting ‘regimes of normativity’ that influence the law. How have the implicit and explicit ethical frameworks of public health law changed over time and in relation to different people and problems – and why?

Speaker Biographies

Mark Bailey is Professor of Later Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. In 2019 he delivered the James Ford Lectures in British History at the University of Oxford, subsequently published as After the Black Death. Economy, Society and the Law in Fourteenth-century England (OUP, 2021).

Alison Bashford is Laureate Professor of History at UNSW, Sydney. Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge. She is Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Fellow of the British Academy. She was awarded the Dan David Award in 2021 for her scholarship in medical history.

Roberta Bivins is a historian of medicine in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Her work has focused on Britain as a node in extensive global networks of migration and exchange from the late seventeenth century until the present day. Since 2004, funded by the Wellcome Trust, she has studied the impacts of immigration and ethnicity on post-war British health, medical research and practice. Recently she has focused on the relationship between migration and the NHS, and the medicalisation of Britain's internal and external borders.

Alex Chase-Levenson is Associate Professor of History and Public Health at Binghamton University and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania. A political, cultural, and medical historian of nineteenth-century Britain, his book The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and won the Stansky Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. Other work has considered such topics as border panics, the history of museums, and the history of travel.

Tom Crook is Reader in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University. He is author of Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, c. 1830–1910 (University of California Press, 2016).

Lorren Eldridge an Early Career Fellow in Legal History at the University of Edinburgh. Her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford on ‘The Historiography of the Medieval Village Community’ engaged with Victorian and modern scholarship to examine the legal practice of the medieval village and, more broadly, medieval legal custom. Her research interests include medieval English legal history, the intersection of legal theory and legal history, and historical contextualisation of modern legal developments. She is also a qualified solicitor in England and Wales (non-practising).

Jonathan Garton is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. His main research interests are in the law and history of the institutions of organised civil society, particularly charities and medieval guilds. He also writes more generally on the law of trusts. His books include The Regulation of Organised Civil Society (Hart, 2009), the charities volume of the fifth edition of Halsbury's Laws of England (Lexis, 2010), Public Benefit in Charity Law (OUP, 2013) and Moffat's Trusts Law (7th ed, CUP, 2020).

Colm McGrath is a Senior Lecturer in Tort Law at the Dickson Poon School of Law at King’s College London. Previously, he was the WYNG Research Fellow in Medical Law and Ethics at Trinity Hall in the University of Cambridge and was a member of the University’s Centre for Law, Medicine and Life Sciences. Before that, he was a University Lecturer in Law at the University of Graz and scientific assistant at the Institute for European Tort Law in Vienna. His monograph The Development of Medical Liability in Germany 1800-1945 (Klostermann Verlag, 2019) was selected by jury as one of the ‘2019 Legal Books of the Year’ in the Neue Juristische Wochenschrift.

Charles Mitchell KC (Hon) FBA is a Professor of Law at UCL. He jointly edited four volumes in the Landmark Cases series of historical studies published by Hart, on Restitution (2006), Contract (2008), Tort (2010) and Equity (2012) and he contributed to WR Cornish et al (eds), Law and Society in England 1750-1950 2nd edn (Hart, 2019). He is currently co-editing a book of essays on the history of equity to be published by Hart in 2023.

Noga Morag-Levine is Professor of Law and George Roumell Faculty Scholar at Michigan State University College of Law. She teaches courses on Constitutional Law and the Regulatory State, as well as Environmental Law. Her scholarship combines environmental regulation, legal history, and comparative law. Her primary focus has been on the influence of legal traditions and their associated administrative-law principles on transnational differences in environmental and health and safety regulation. Her work considers this question across various periods in British and American history, as well as current environmental debates.  Her most recent article (forthcoming in the American Journal of Comparative Law) is titled ‘Chemical Pollution and Regulatory Choices at the Start of Industrialization: Comparing France and Britain’.

Joe Sampson is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Assistant Professor in Legal History at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the history of private law in England and Europe, with a focus on medieval England and medieval and early modern Europe. He is particularly interested in the ways in which legal doctrine has been influenced by other intellectual forces, with recent research focusing on the extent to which early modern delict (tort) was shaped by theological debates.

Chantal Stebbings is Emeritus Professor of Law and Legal History at the University of Exeter, and Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Tax Law, University of Cambridge. She has published extensively in the legal history of tax in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, with a special interest in tax administration, having served as a General Commissioner of Income Tax for many years. Her research covers principally the legal regimes of the establishment taxes and income tax. This research has been funded by a British Academy Research Readership, a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and the Wellcome Trust. Her last monograph, the fourth for Cambridge University Press, is entitled Tax, Medicines and the Law: from Quackery to Pharmacy.

Christopher Szabla is Assistant Professor in International Law at Durham University. Previously Global Academic Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, he specialises in international law, global history, and mobility, including migration and borders. His projects include a history of the international law and organizations relating to migration and an examination of the difficulties of jurisdiction and border control in small colonial territories.

Katherine D. Watson is Reader in History at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research interests focus on topics where medicine, crime and the law intersect, particularly in Britain since the seventeenth century. She is the author of Medicine and Justice: Medico-Legal Practice in England and Wales, 1700-1914 (Routledge, 2020) and Acid Attacks in Britain, 1760-1975 (Palgrave, forthcoming 2023).

Janet Weston is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for History in Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research interests include histories of forensic psychiatry, prison medicine, HIV/AIDS, and mental health law, and she currently holds a Wellcome Trust University Award to investigate ‘Ethics and British public health law, 1920-2020’.

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