Sir James Sir James Fitzjames StephenFitzjames Stephen

Sir James Sir James  Fitzjames StephenFitzjames Stephen

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, born in 1829 and died in 1894, was a lawyer, professor and judge. He is perhaps most famous for his work History of the Criminal Law, published in 1883. In his writings, which also include Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) and A Digest of Criminal Law (Crimes and Punishments) (1877), Stephen attacked classic liberalism as is represented in the writings of John Stuart Mill. Indeed, Stephen was of the view that the “theories advanced ... in most of his [Mill’s] later works are unsound.” Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was written in response to that democratic creed, Give me liberty, equality and fraternity. To this he wrote, “There are a vast number of matters in respect of which men ought not to be free; they are fundamentally unequal, and they are not brothers at all ...”