Hanging Matters: Petty Theft, Sentence of Death, and a Lost Statute of Edward I

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Henry Summerson

This article discusses an important aspect of the law relating to theft in thirteenth-century England, and one of the ways in which that law developed. Central to it is the argument that the treatise The Mirror of Justices and references in court records and reports show that a short statute enacted early in the reign of Edward I, probably in 1278, categorically defined 12d. as the amount, whether in goods or money, at which larceny became a capital felony, incurring judgment of death. As well as setting out the evidence for this hitherto overlooked ordinance, the article also argues that the statute can be associated with some significant developments in the way petty theft was treated subsequently. In particular it had the effect of promoting the development of penal imprisonment, while since the task of valuation was given to trial juries, it further enhanced the leading role of the latter in determining the fates of the men and women whose lives depended on their verdicts.

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-253
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Stefanowicz

This article undertakes to show the way that has led to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia-related murder and assisted suicide in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It presents the evolution of the views held by Dutch society on the euthanasia related practice, in the consequence of which death on demand has become legal after less than thirty years. Due attention is paid to the role of organs of public authority in these changes, with a particular emphasis put on the role of the Dutch Parliament – the States General. Because of scarcity of space and limited length of the article, the change in the attitudes toward euthanasia, which has taken place in the Netherlands, is presented in a synthetic way – from the first discussions on admissibility of a euthanasia-related murder carried out in the 1970s, through the practice of killing patients at their request, which was against the law at that time, but with years began more and more acceptable, up to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia by the Dutch Parliament, made with the support of the majority of society.


2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 128-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Hockey ◽  
Rachel Dilley ◽  
Victoria Robinson ◽  
Alexandra Sherlock

This article raises questions about the role of footwear within contemporary processes of identity formation and presents ongoing research into perceptions, experiences and memories of shoes among men and women in the North of England. In a series of linked theoretical discussions it argues that a focus on women, fashion and shoe consumption as a feature of a modern, western ‘project of the self’ obscures a more revealing line of inquiry where footwear can be used to explore the way men and women live out their identities as fluid, embodied processes. In a bid to deepen theoretical understanding of such processes, it takes account of historical and contemporary representations of shoes as a symbolically efficacious vehicle for personal transformation, asking how the idea and experience of transformation informs everyday and life course experiences of transition, as individuals put on and take off particular pairs of shoes. In so doing, the article addresses the methodological and analytic challenges of accessing experience that is both fluid and embodied.


Author(s):  
Julia S. Kharitonova ◽  
◽  
Larisa V. Sannikova ◽  

Nowadays, the law is being transformed as a regulator of relations. The idea of strengthe-ning the regulatory role of technologies in the field of streamlining public relations is making much headway in the world. This trend is most pronounced in the area of regulation of private relations. The way of such access to the market as crowdfunding is becoming increasingly widespread. The issuing of the so-called secured tokens is becoming popular for both small businesses and private investors. The trust in new ways of attracting investments is condi-tioned by the applied technology - the use of blockchain as a decentralized transparent data-base management system. Under these conditions, there is such a phenomenon as the democ-ratization of property relations. Every individual receives unlimited opportunities to invest via technologies. Thus, legal scholars all over the world face the question about the role of the law and law in these relations? We believe that we are dealing with such a worldwide trend of regulating public relations as the socialization of the law. Specific examples of issuing tokens in Russia and abroad show the main global trends in the transformation of private law. The platformization of economics leads to the tokenization and democratization of property relations. In this aspect, the aim of lawyers should be to create a comfortable legal environment for the implementation of projects aimed at democratizing property relations in Russia. The socialization of private law is aimed at achieving social jus-tice and is manifested in the creation of mechanisms to protect the rights of the weak party and rules to protect private investors. Globalization requires the study of both Russian and foreign law. To confirm their hypothesis, the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the legislation of Russia, Europe and the United States to identify the norms allowing to see the process of socialization of law in the above field. The generalization of Russian and foreign experience showed that when searching for proper legal regulation, the states elect one of the policies. In some countries, direct regulation of ICOs and related emission relations are being created, in others, it is about the extension of the existing legislation to a new changing tokenization relationship. The European Union countries are seeking to develop common rules to create a regulatory environment to attract investors to the crypto industry and protect them. Asian countries are predominantly developing national legislation in isolation from one another, but most of them are following a unified course to encourage investment in crypto assets while introducing strict rules against fraud on financial markets. The emphasis on the protection of the rights of investors or shareholders, token holders by setting a framework, including private law mechanisms, can be called common to all approaches. This is the aim of private law on the way to social justice.


2020 ◽  
pp. 88-124
Author(s):  
Arzoo Osanloo

This chapter studies the operations of the Iranian criminal law and analyzes how the procedural administration of the law animates the shariʻa. Iranian criminal laws provide many avenues for victims to forgo retributive sanctioning. But preserving the right of retribution serves several purposes: maintaining the sovereign's monopoly on legitimate violence, giving victims a sense of power, and halting the cycle of violence. The way Iran achieves this comprises an interesting balancing act between maintaining the monopoly over legitimate violence and granting individual victims the right of retribution, which its leaders believe, through their interpretation of the shariʻa, cannot be appropriated by the sovereign. Since the law categorizes intentional murder as qisas and leaves judges with no discretion in sentencing, the judges may use their considerable influence to pressure the family to forgo retribution. The chapter then considers the role of judges and examines how the laws (substantive and procedural) shape their reasoning and discretion in both sentencing and encouraging forbearance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 768-786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Phipps

AbstractWomen engaged in litigation in Nottingham's borough court as both plaintiffs and defendants for a variety of reasons relating to trade, household provisioning, misbehavior and interpersonal disputes. This article examines how women's litigation was determined by the doctrine of coverture and the way that women's marital status shaped and defined their experience of the law. In doing so, it explores how these pleas reveal the workings of the marital partnership within a late medieval English town. In order to contextualize the experiences of women “under coverture,” the article first traces the ways in which all manner of female marital and household identities were documented in the court records, analyzing the descriptors that court scribes attached to individual women's names. The article highlights inconsistency in the way that women's identities were recorded and in the way that the marital partnership was represented through the litigation of spouses in the borough court. The dual focus of this article not only adds new evidence to ongoing discussions of the nature of medieval coverture but also interrogates how we identify coverture and women's marital statuses based on the evidence of court records.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-379
Author(s):  
Charles Fried

Abstract In The Choice Theory of Contracts, Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller state that by arguing “that autonomy matters centrally to contract,” Contract as Promise makes an “enduring contribution . . . but [its] specific arguments faltered because [they] missed the role of diverse contract types and because [it] grounded contractual freedom in a flawed rights-based view. . .. We can now say all rights-based arguments for contractual autonomy have failed.” The authors conclude that their proposed choice theory “approach returns analysis to the mainstream of twentieth-century liberalism – a tradition concerned with enhancing self-determination that is mostly absent in contract theory today.” Perhaps the signal flaw in Contract as Promise they sought to address was the homogenization of all contract types under a single paradigm. In this Article, I defend the promise principle as the appropriate paradigm for the regime of contract law. Along the way I defend the Kantian account of this subject, while acknowledging that state enforcement necessarily introduces elements — both normative and institutional — for which that paradigm fails adequately to account. Of particular interest and validity is Dagan and Heller’s discussion of contract types, to which the law has always and inevitably recurred. They show how this apparent constraint on contractual freedom actually enhances freedom to contract. I discuss what I have learned from their discussion: that choice like languages, is “lumpy,” so that realistically choices must be made between and framed within available types, off the rack, as it were, and not bespoke on each occasion. I do ask as well how these types come into being mutate, and can be deliberately adapted to changing circumstances.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Feldman ◽  
Mark Gould

In a recent issue of this journal (Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 1990), Susan Sterett examined the role of the Law Commission in the development of English administrative law. She suggested that the Commission mimicked a “peak association” and adopted an “idiom of legalism” in order to justify its reform proposals. This comment disagrees with Sterett on three grounds. First, the role and constitutional position of the Commission is far more complex than Sterett suggests, and this affects the way in which the Commission works. Second, judges and academic lawyers were central to the reform of substantive principles of judicial review in the 1960s and 1970s, making it unnecessary for the Law Commission to act in this field. Finally, it is wrong to ignore the fact that much administrative law occurs outside the judicial review procedure.


2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (7) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Виктория Ерыгина ◽  
Viktoriya Erygina

Yet another change of the electoral system at the federal elections in the Russian Federation, the revision of the rules of conducting elections triggers a number of the questions about purposes and criteria of such reforms, doubts their objective nature, and undermines voters’ trust in the elections. The variety of electoral systems and the search for the best one is the topic of fierce scientific debates in various social sciences, including jurisprudence. Since the electoral system is a complex scientific category, there are many different approaches and methods to investigate it. And the author undertakes the search of those to emphasize the importance of taking into account of scientific developments, political will manifestations when the legislator resolves the conceptual task of selecting the electoral system that in suitable for the society and the objective conditions. The author recognizes the leading role of party-political ideology, viability when reforming the electoral legislation. However, in order to strengthen the legal order in the country, scientifically substantiated conclusions, obtained through the combination of general scientific, special (sociological, psychological and historical-cultural), particular methods of legal science, should become the basis for any legislation, including the electoral one. The author reveals such new methodological approaches, as anthropological, culturological, historical, social-psychological and comparative-legal for the conceptual solution of the problem of selection the best electoral system and its further use in the law-making and law-enforcement practice. The author touches upon the issue of searching for a scientific set of instruments, with the aid of which it is possible to apply the science in the political sphere in order to control political processes, including through the law.


Author(s):  
Meghan J. DiLuzio

This book illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, the book emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community's well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. The book explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. The book offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.


2019 ◽  
pp. 15-50
Author(s):  
Susanna L. Blumenthal

Taking Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857) as a point of departure, this essay explores the perils of trusting too much or too little in the representations of strangers in a burgeoning capitalist society. It attends in particular to the “natural struggle between charity and prudence” that was exhibited not only by fictional passengers on the steamboat Fidèle but also by their real-life counterparts in nineteenth-century American courtrooms, where alleged con men and women were more than occasionally called to account for their questionable moneymaking ventures. While many of the era’s imaginative writers figured the law and its enforcers as marginal and ill equipped to meet the challenges posed by fraudsters, contemporary court records tell a different story, revealing the ways members of the bench and bar endeavored to police the ambiguous borderlands between capitalism and crime.


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