Peter Linebaugh, Professor, UT Department of History
“The Magna Carta Manifesto”
February 20, Noon
The University of Toledo College of Law Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public

Peter Linebaugh will speak about his most recent book, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press: Berkeley, California). The book has been described as "groundbreaking" and praised for providing a sweeping history of the Magna Carta. Linebaugh argues that longstanding restraints against tyranny derived from the ancient document – the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process of law, and the prohibition of torture – have been abridged and need to be won anew.

Linebaugh, who has been described by one reviewer as the most important historian living today, is a student of E.P. Thompson and received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore and of Columbia, he taught at Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harvard and Tufts before joining The University of Toledo in 1994.

Linebaugh is the author of the acclaimed social history of crime and the death penalty in 18th-century England, The London Hanged (1991), co-editor, with Doug Hay and E.P. Thompson, of Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975), and co-author with Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:  Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press Boston, 2000; Verso: London, 2000, paperback 2001). 

His articles have appeared in such publications as The New Left Review, New York University Law Review, Radical History Review and Social History.  He writes frequently for the online magazine CounterPunch.

The Magna Carta Manifesto will be available for sale before and after the talk. Linebaugh’s talk at the UT College of Law is free and open to the public. There will be no ticketing in the law school lot from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., with the exception of expired metered spots, during the speech. For directions to The University of Toledo College of Law or for more information on this or other upcoming speakers, visit www.utlaw.edu.