Gerry Rubin, Murder, Mutiny and the Military: British Court Martial Cases 1940-1966. London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2005, 427 pp. ISBN 1903427258.

To the non-lawyer, and indeed to the average lawyer, the world of military law and courts martial is a closed one. To the outsider, it seems like the army trying its own, although the reality is far more complex. Those wanting to gain some detailed knowledge of the law will pick up Rant’s Courts-Martial, Discipline, and the Criminal Process in the Armed Services, the second edition of which was published by Oxford University Press in 2003, and will struggle with the technical nature of the analysis. Although Rant’s work remains the leading (indeed only) text for practitioners, a far more accessible and readable book is Gerry Rubin’s history of British courts martial, from 1940 to 1966. Of course, the readership is different, but Rubin’s work is a welcome addition to the limited literature on courts martial. Its methodology is straightforward – after an introductory overview of the context and...