Thanks again for the positive review. I enjoyed the book, and yes, the history part was exceedingly well-written, and accessible to the non-lawyer.

Jon

Thanks for the review. I picked up the last copy of the book from the BU Barnes & Noble; for those in the hub, another copy is at the Harvard Coop.

Would Waddams’s Sexual Slander in Nineteenth-Century England: Defamation in the Ecclesiastical Courts, 1815–1855 be a good fit to this list? (I have to admit, I only read McLaren’s review of it). One curious fact from this book– I will look for it in Friedman– is that in the ecclesiastical courts, for sexual slander, truth was not needed as a defense. For those non-lawyers out there like myself, that meant that if a woman was accused of cavorting with so-and-so, she could sue for defamation without needing to prove that she wasn’t.

This could be relevant today in figuring out how to adjudicate defamation complaints outside the legal system.