High Crimes and Misdemeanors: Impeachment trials and their Rhetoric

This course explores the history of impeachment trials in Athens, Britain, and the USA. We study some of the early deployments of impeachment (eisangelia in Greek) at Athens, its brief flourish in fourteenth century Britain, and its flowering in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Subsequently we turn to the impeachment of Warren Hastings in 1788-1795 and then to the earliest impeachments in the US. We keep in mind the different time periods and governmental structures (direct democracy, monarchy with parliament, representative democracy) and investigate how legal processes--and their rhetoric--function in each of them.