Plausible Crime Stories
The Legal History of Sexual Offences in Mandate Palestine

This first study of the legal history of sex offences in Mandate Palestine pioneers a new socio-cultural perspective on evidence.

Orna Alyagon Darr (Author)

9781108739634, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 February 2020

215 pages
24.5 x 17 x 1.2 cm, 0.35 kg

'Like all good scholarly monographs, Orna Alyagon Darr's terrific book … is in fact several books in one. For historians of Britain and the Middle East, [it] provides an illuminating addition to scholarship on the British Mandate in Palestine by incorporating a gendered approach to its legal history. For legal scholars, and especially historians among them, [it] emphasizes the importance of a history of evidentiary and procedural norms and practices, rather than the more commonly studied substantive fields. Similarly, [it] provides specialists in evidence law a much-needed historicization and rationale for many of its ostensibly neutral doctrinal norms, such as the requirement of corroboration in cases of sexual assault. Finally, for activists and scholars interested in understanding the complexity of sex offences, Darr provides an important historicization of their legislation and adjudication, a history that defamiliarizes much that we take for granted about sex offences by uncovering their roots in colonial systems and discourses.' Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Law, Culture and the Humanities

Plausible Crime Stories is not only the first in-depth study of the history of sex offences in Mandate Palestine but it also pioneers an approach to the historical study of criminal law and proof that focuses on plausibility. Doctrinal rules of evidence only partially explain which crime stories make sense while others fail to convince. Since plausibility is predicated on commonly held systems of belief, it not only provides a key to the meanings individual social players ascribe to the law but also yields insight into communal perceptions of the legal system, self-identity, the essence of normality and deviance and notions of gender, morality, nationality, ethnicity, age, religion and other cultural institutions. Using archival materials, including documents relating to 147 criminal court cases, this socio-legal study of plausibility opens a window onto a broad societal view of past beliefs, dispositions, mentalities, tensions, emotions, boundaries and hierarchies.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Legal background
2. Cultural narratives underlying proof: male-to-male offences
3. Plausibility of children's testimonies: narrator's identity
4. Plausibility and ethnicity: audience-narrator nexus
5. Plausible emotions
6. Corroboration: plausibility embedded in evidentiary standards
7. Implausible counter-narratives
Conclusion
List of legal cases
Appendix: relevant criminal legislation
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Criminal justice law [LNFB], Criminal law & procedure [LNF], Legal history [LAZ], Crime & criminology [JKV], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]