'In the final analysis, the significance of Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700-1850 is greater than the sum of its parts. Each chapter provides an interesting, well-researched analysis that will undoubtedly be useful to a specialized audience of legal and cultural historians who study the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But taken as a whole, the book accomplishes much more than that. It provides a vivid picture of a rising print culture that largely supplanted the physical presence of ordinary folk at criminal trials.' Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books 'These essays together provide a nuanced assessment of how developments in courtroom culture and court reporting could in some ways offer opportunities for the kind of rational, critical debate typical of the Habermasian public sphere, yet in other ways closed off the space for such discussion. This has important insights for how we understand the law as ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' History 'Overall this is a cohesive collection that substantially accounts for the developing professionalism of trials, changes in attitudes to the courts, the way the workings of the courts were reported to a wider public, and especially the way that the emergence of a professional body of criminal advocates changed not only the conduct of trials but also public perceptions of the legal system.' Parergon 'One of the few areas of historical enquiry that has hitherto remained largely untouched by [JÃ1/4rgen] Habermas' work is the history of crime and the courts. This collection helps to rectify this apparent anomaly, and forms a welcome contribution to reconfiguring our understanding of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - of modernity.' English Historical Review