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The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789-1800, Vol. 2: The Justices on Circuit, 1790-1794

Conley implicitly and explicitly criticizes the discretion exercised by the forces of respectability in Kent and the real and potential inequities that this local discretion created. Yet she also seems to have reservations about the regularization of the period. In discussing the conflicts between the London police force and the Kentish constabulary, it is apparent that the local constables were more sensitive to the realities of their "beat" than the imported coppers. There seems to be, in fact, an unresolved tension in the book between the potential and actual problems of community justice and the recognition that at times local justice was far superior. This ambivalence is difficult to avoid—the various examples of local discretion run amok prevent the historian from wholeheartedly endorsing the local community as the ultimate source of law. Yet at the same time it is undeniable that community considerations in sentencing and other aspects of justice often served both abstract justice and local community needs. This central issue deserves more direct attention than it receives. This book is quite enlightening in its treatment of "respectability" as a concept underlying the community's approach to crime. Conley discusses at some length and quite convincingly the hallmarks of respectability for Victorians, and the extent to which members of the middle class (and those aspiring to it) were preoccupied with this concept. Conley convincingly delineates the manner in which this preoccupation with respectability slanted the administration of criminal law in nineteenth-century Kent. This book leaves the reader with the chilling sense that our modern criminal justice continues to be shaped by unfortunate assumptions about criminality and culpability shared with the Victorians.