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Manning the Law: Why the Legal Person Remains a Man

Manning the Law: Why the Legal Person Remains a Man

Author: Ngaire Naffine
Publisher: Hart Publishing
ISBN: 9781509983513
Published In: October 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

List Price: AU$234.00

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Description
Contents

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This is a study of elite English men of English law and the methods they used to retain and justify their power and privilege, through controlling the story of the legal person.

It looks at how these men of legal authority thought of themselves and their institution; how they studied and explained law; and how they put themselves in the middle of it, as the standard human in need of legal regulation and protection and in charge of that regulation and protection, and assigned to women an inferior legal role and being.

The main concept employed to do all this was 'the legal person'. From the 1860s to the 1920s the courts declared that women were not 'persons' who could exercise public power – to vote, to sit in Parliament, to gain degrees, to be lawyers. Up to the end of the 20th century, and into the 21st, women's personhood remained precarious in the private sphere, for rape was excused within a marriage and female reproduction remained under state control (as it still does).

It looks at the positive exclusion of women from the means of making legal meaning, especially the ability to shape law's central concept and shows the epistemological effects of this sex differential of legal power which are still felt today. Leading legal thinkers who helped to construct the concept are still revered. Law's continuing male orientation is neither seen nor acknowledged and the legal person is treated (falsely) as if he had always been and remains anyone.

Preface

Introduction: Male Control of the Legal Story of the Person: The Power of Legal Definition and Explanation

1. The Concepts of the Legal Person and the Individual

2. Controlling the Story of the Legal Person in the Victorian Period: Mill, Stephen and the 19th-century Persons Cases

3. Controlling the Story of the Legal Person in the Early 20th Century: The 20th-century Persons Cases and the Role of the Lord Chancellors

4. Case Study 1: AV Dicey and the Exercise of Male Legal Power in the Early 20th Century

5. The Reform Stories and the Uses of Explanatory Power: The Last Persons Case, the Abolition of the Marital Rape Immunity, and the Development of Hart's Concept of Law

6: Case Study 2: John Finnis: Male Legal Power Sustained and Reinforced in the 21st Century

7: Findings: The Legal Person Remains a Man

8. Questioning the Common Sense View of Male Power

9. The Heuristic Device of Modern Law (That the Person Has Always Been Anyone), and What to Do Now