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

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.

Orna Alyagon Darr is a Senior Lecturer at the law schools of Sapir Academic College and Ono Academic College. She is the author of Marks of an Absolute Witch: Evidentiary Dilemmas in Early Modern England (2011). Her work explores evidence law, criminal law and criminal procedure in their cultural, social and historical context, and her articles have been published in leading academic journals such as Law and History Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Continuity and Change and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.