A SEMINAL WORK ON CRIMINAL LAW Considered one of the four major law books of the eighteenth century by Holdsworth in his History of English Law, Hawkins's Pleas is the first comprehensive English treatise on criminal law. Reprint of the third edition, the last in the author's lifetime. "...deservedly of high authority and still cited. It was the starting point of modern laborious treatises on the criminal law which are valuable as digests of the subject, but which have no advance on Hawkins plan or style." --Percy H. Winfield, Chief Sources of English Legal History 326 WILLIAM HAWKINS [1673-1746] was a member of the Inner Temple, a serjeant-at-law and an important legal scholar. His first work, an abridgment of Coke Upon Littleton, went through several editions. He also published a collection of statutes. Originally published in 1716, A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown went through seven editions by the end of the eighteenth century and remained an authority into the mid-1800s.