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,...