The quest of the king in the Wisdom of Solomon

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-70
Author(s):  
Mark Giszczak

Historians largely agree that Hellenistic kingship was founded, not primarily on heredity, but on military achievement (MacDonald, 2015). The right to rule was thus militarily meritocratic, but philosophically unsteady, so kings felt the need to propagandize by commissioning writings peri basileias. Diogenes Laertius gives evidence that this type of kingship literature was widely produced in this era, though only fragments of these texts survive. The tracts attributed to Ecphantus, Diotogenes, and Sthenidas, along with the Letter of Aristeas, reveal that Hellenistic kingship was supported by a mythos that viewed obtaining kingship as a kind of moral achievement. The king’s virtues are emphasized as godlike and worthy of imitation by his subjects, as he embodies the law in his person. The Wisdom of Solomon reworks this kingship tradition by “democratizing” kingship (Newman, 2004) to all to call his readers to imitate Solomon’s choice of wisdom over folly. Solomon’s search for and embrace of wisdom (7:7; 8:2) takes the place of militaristic emphases and establishes a universalizable pattern for the moral quest of the individual. Wisdom domesticates a Hellenistic pattern of seeking wisdom and thus achieving kingly rule, which eventually allows one to be a benefactor of others. Wisdom is beneficent (7:23) and, rather than becoming a god, the wise Solomon benefits others with his wise and just rule (Wis 8:10–15; 9:12). Even the wise Israelites become benefactors to others (19:14). Thus, the quest of the king for wisdom follows a familiar outline of the journey of a king from obscurity, to conquest, to rule, to beneficence.

Author(s):  
Steve Cornelius

Our modern society has become transfixed with celebrity. Business people and marketers also endeavour to cash in on the popularity enjoyed by the stars and realise the value of associating merchandise or trademarks with the rich and famous. This leads to difficulties when the attributes of a person are apparently used without consent, which poses new questions to the law: should the law protect the individual against the unlawful use of his or her image? If so, to what extent should such protection be granted? These were some of the questions which the court had to answer in Wells v Atoll Media (Pty). The judgment in Wellshas redefined the right to identity and provided some clarity on what the infringement of that right would amount to. When the attributes of a person are used without consent, the right to identity can be violated in one of four ways. A person's right to identity can be infringed upon if the attributes of that person are used without permission in a way which cannot be reconciled with the true image of the individual concerned, if the use amounts to the commercial exploitation of the individual, if it cannot be reconciled with generally accepted norms of decency, or if it violates the privacy of that person.


1979 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Robert E. Paul

This article defines and describes the interrelated but conceptually distinct terms “confidentiality,” “privilege,” “privileged communications,” “privacy,” and “records.” It reviews the parameters of these words, discusses the variance between the extent of the physician-patient and that of the much broader licensed psychologist-patient privilege in Pennsylvania and, in particular, reviews the situations in which assertions of confidentiality and privilege cannot prevent third parties from gaining access to records and the information contained in them and the legal cases which set out the law in these areas. Finally, it reviews the demands to see records by patients and the increasing willingness of courts, legislators, and regulators to grant not only access but also the right to correct, add to, or destroy such records if the patient wishes to do so.


Legal Ukraine ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 14-23
Author(s):  
Vasyl Datsenko

On today’s international law, there is a broad consensus on the idea of ​​those who want to talk about all the children and the importance of guilty mother’s interests. Buti and the court at the right are guilty of the arrest of nikrashchikh іnterestіv ditini. Vrakhovuchi is the issue of clear legislative regulation of the law and practice of legal practice of securing terminology of the interest of children, the author has analyzed the law of international law. At the statutory international legal order, there is a need for ECHRL, in some ways there is a lack of food for the protection of interested children in case of a viable dispute about it. Analyzed the keys to the position of the court regarding disputes regarding the child’s privacy Order No. 14 (2013) of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child «On the right of a child to receive respect for the rest of the world». Вased on a systematic analysis of the provisions of General Comment No. 14, the author identified two blocks of key positions that the court must adhere to when resolving a child dispute to ensure its best interests: 1) basic positions; 2) the procedure for assessing and determining the best interests of the child. The Committee underlines that the child’s best interests is a threefold concept: a substantive right; A fundamental, interpretative legal principle; A rule of procedure. Another main point is the idea of how to apply it to each child individually. One more fundamental principle of the application of the Convention is that the State has no discretion to determine whether to prioritize the best interests of the child and give them due weight in any action. When assessing and determining the best interests of the child in order to make a decision on a specific measure, the following steps should be followed: (a) First, within the specific factual context of the case, find out what are the relevant elements in a best-interests assessment, give them concrete content, and assign a weight to each in relation to one another; (b) Secondly, to do so, follow a procedure that ensures legal guarantees and proper application of the right. As a result of this scientific research, the author has come to the conclusion that providing the best interests of the child are not universal. It must be obtained by the court as a result of identifying and assessing the individual needs of the child, taking into account the specifics of the subject matter of the case being considered by the court. If the court correctly identified and assessed such needs, followed certain legal guarantees, then the decision taken as a result of the case should be considered to be made in the best interests of the child. Key words: concept of the best interests of the child, family law relations, evaluation and determination of the best interests of the child, legal guarantees.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Zuryati Mohamed Yusoff

<p>In Malaysia, the rights and liberties of the individual are recognised in the Federal Constitution of Malaysia. However, the right to privacy does not have the express constitutional recognition enjoyed by other rights such as the right to life and liberty and freedom of expression. This thesis identifies gaps in the protection of privacy interests in the current legal framework. There is no self-standing law on privacy in Malaysia, though there are several laws which provide limited rights to privacy such as the laws on data protection and criminal law. The existing laws are inadequate to protect private information and to protect against the intrusion of privacy. The importation of foreign principles through the reception of English Common Law offers only limited protection. Malaysia should, therefore, have a specific law to protect privacy. With a view to attaining that goal for Malaysia, this thesis undertakes a comparative analysis of two different experiences of the development of the law of privacy. They are the privacy law in England, which is largely based on the law of breach of confidence, and the privacy law in New Zealand, which has a distinct privacy tort recognised in its case law. The conclusion is that those countries’ experience can inform developments in Malaysia, and that the best way for Malaysia to develop its law now is by the enactment of a specific Privacy Act.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Robert Deuchars

<p>When the words good or bad are uttered the user generally takes their meaning derived from a system of ethics or morals. In this sense good and bad are particularist in nature and also socio-culturally specific. Let us take a simple example from Antiquity. At school in the West we learn of a figure called Alexander the Great, the Macedonian. By all accounts we are taught that he was a great, and by extension a good man. In modern day Iran Alexander of Macedonia is known as Alexander the Devil. So the question arises: was Alexander good or bad, or both? Is it possible to state unequivocally that the actions of Alexander were as a matter of fact morally good or morally bad? I think the answer to this question is fairly straightforward: it depends. Now this answer is not a simple descent into postmodern territory and moral relativism; there are genuine and empirical reasons to believe all three possibilities pertaining to the actions of Alexander. In short it is not possible to extrapolate from the particular to the general and it is not a question of semantics or even of critical hermeneutics. There is no either/or for Alexander of Macedonia. The binary opposition of good and bad cannot be applied to the particular actions of an individual and furthermore cannot be generalized as a principle, rule or otherwise. This distinction or argument between what can be deemed good and what can be deemed bad may at first sight seem irrelevant to the law but it is not. In moral philosophy natural law theory states that law is based on morality, therefore negating the possibility of a bad law. It is at this point that Jeremy Bentham comes to our attention. Bentham believed that law and morality, although connected need not necessarily be so. Under the principle of utility, which I will explore in more detail later in this essay, Bentham believed that individual intent of an action could be disassociated from the intent that ought to be in place. The principle of utility was this test. In other words when determining the right course of action and what laws should be obeyed for all circumstances and systems, the principle of utility was the foundation. And I will argue later on in this essay that although Bentham is identified as a legal positivist and a philosophical realist his negative idealism is based on an error, much in the same way that he thought he had identified the fallacy of natural law. Bentham’s foundations may not be on stilts but perhaps, more accurately, they were built on silt. Moreover Bentham’s position as a moral philosopher is rather unusual in that although he was indeed interested in the behavior of the individual he was insofar as that behavior might have some bearing on a general system of law. This essay is therefore concerned with this troubling problem. I will proceed as follows. Firstly, I will give an overview of Bentham’s criticism of natural law and of William Blackstone in particular. Secondly, I will look at Bentham’s contribution to the internationalization of the law and his use of the “principle of utility”; he coined the neologism “international” as one of many. I will then move on to see how Bentham expected to actualize his foundational principle through his efforts to persuade others of the efficacy of codifying international law as a form of ‘science’. I conclude by arguing that Bentham’s philosophical realism was, in fact a form of idealism, bordering on the religious; his ‘cosmic calculus’.</p>


2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 457-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Lapidoth ◽  
Ofra Friesel

In 2003 Israel adopted the Nationality and Entry into Israel (Provisional Measure) Law, 5763-2003. The Provisional Measure deals generally with entry into Israel; at first it dealt only with entry into Israel of residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and later it was extended also to nationals and residents of Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. It is particularly relevant for cases of unification of families and immigration for the purpose of marriage.The following article offers a short summary of the law as it has been amended in 2005 and 2007, as well as its interpretation by the government (since 2008) and then examines its conformity with international law. The Provisional Measure involves a clash between the right of the individual to marry the person of his choice and establish a family on the one hand, and the right of the state to regulate freely immigration and entry into its territory on the other hand. Since international law has not established a right to family unification nor to immigration for the purpose of marriage, the right of the state prevails in this matter. Yet, the Provisional Measure deviates from international law in a different aspect, as it leads to a de facto discrimination, mostly of Israeli Arabs. This discrimination is not permitted by the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, to which Israel is a party. It is recommended that Israel amends the law in order to bring it into conformity with international law.


1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.


2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (02) ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
Assia BOUAMRA

The new millennium has brought about profound developments in society, reaching all fields through which means of communication have become, as a result of the digital revolution, basic pillars for the growth of countries' economies, which has affected the traditional human lifestyle socially, economically and culturally, and it became necessary to update the current legal arsenal to match the new bets, as the law Not in isolation from developments in the technological arena, it has become necessary to frame these technologies in order to protect the individual and society alike, as it is wrong to ignore the thesis of the effects of cyberspace on society and the law.


Author(s):  
Lidija Rozentale

There is a continuous debate in the public space on the need for a legal framework for the partnership institute to ensure equal legal security for the family, regardless of the existence or non-existence of the legal fact of its foundation. The fundamental aspects of the debate include the insufficient regulatory framework and vulnerability of partners before the law, divergent national views on partnerships as a union between opposite-sex partners, religious beliefs condemning non-marital relationships, including the existing property issues in the context of partnerships. According to the Author of the Paper, the existing partnerships in Latvia are discriminated in favour for the marriage due to the moral views and legal aspects, as the individual living in the partnership is restricted in terms of access to information and is vulnerable in terms of property rights. For example, when an individual lives in the partnership, he or she is denied the right to be informed about the health status of the other partner and the existing liabilities in credit institutions. In cohabitation, the individual is not recognised as a member of the family of the tenant for the purpose of the Law on Residential Tenancy and the potential consequences of the partnership may be the denied right to inheritance or tenancy.Main methods used: sociological method for analysing the compliance of laws and regulations with public interests and aims. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 127-133
Author(s):  
Kotenko Т.

The article deals with the historical stages of the creation, development, and formation of a human rights institute. The ideological and theoretical heritage of Ancient Greece and Rome, which is the basis for the study of ideas about justice, social equality, and human freedom, is analyzed based on the analysis of the fundamental ideas of the most famous thinkers of antiquity. It was the philosophers of antiquity who initiated the concept of "natural law", which was formed over the centuries by the desire of man to understand the world, determine his place in society and politics. From the time of antiquity, the concept of human rights gradually began to emerge; Subsequently, the concept of equality, freedom of person, person, and citizen were formed. Ancient philosophers came up with the idea of law in general and the idea of human rights under the requirements of their time and conditions of social development. Over time, the ancient perception of social equality, justice, dignity, independence, and freedom of man became the starting point and benchmark of European political culture. The early period of the development of political and legal doctrines in ancient Greece is associated with the time of the formation of ancient Greek statehood. It was at this time that an attempt was made to give rationalist ideas about ethical and legal order in human affairs and relations instead of mythological ones. It should be noted that ancient Greek views on human rights were formed in mythological ideas about the origin of policies and divine justice. That is why rights come from the divine order of justice, which became the basis for the category equality. Only what corresponded to the concept of equality (within the concept of justice) was understood as right. In ancient Greek politics, customs and mono-norms gradually transformed towards protecting the dignity of citizens. The polite democracy gave impetus to the emergence of freedom, which promoted the emergence of equal political rights among the citizens of this policy. In the Greek city-state, the law first emerged as a specific phenomenon, and the life of the policy began to be compulsory for everyone. Subsequently, the Pythagoreans (VI –V centuries BC) formulated an important role in shaping the idea of legal equality and justice, using numerical proportions, that is, the ratio of certain parameters. The provision that "fair is to pay another equal" essentially introduces the coupon principle. Subsequently, this reflected Solon (7th-6th centuries BC) in his reforms. It eliminated debt slavery and, as a result of the compromise between nobility and demos, introduced a moderate censorship democracy in Athens. All citizens of the policy should equally be protected by the law and obey its mandatory rules (1). Recognized the law as a requirement of legal equality of free citizens of the policy, slaves did not apply the legal rules. Equality was considered in two respects: equality in law and equality before the law. Developed by Roman lawyers provisions in which a person acts as a subject of law, determine the legal status of a person, establish the freedom and formal equality of people under natural law, define Roman citizenship as a special legal status of a person, the distribution of the right to private and public, etc. contributed to the awareness of legal the importance of human rights in the context of the systematic doctrine of the legal nature of the relationship between the individual and the state. Roman law, extending to a state which it regarded as the object of its study along with positive law, ensured a legal relationship between the state and the individual, which was crucial for the development of the institution of the protection of individual rights in the world at that time (14, p. 119). In relation to individuals, the state was not above the rule of law, but directly its component part, which has all the basic properties of a law. The basis of a just and legal relationship between the individual and the state recognized the law, not the state. The individual and the state must be law-abiding subjects of legal relations, that is, act according to the rules of law. Conclusion. To sum up, we can point out that the first theoretical developments and statutory provisions of the law go back to ancient times. The thinkers of Ancient Greece and Rome initiated the basic concepts of justice, equality, autonomy. It was then that ideas about political rights, lawmaking, democracy, and the personal responsibility of citizens were formed. However, freedom was not universal, it did not belong to slaves, and they were not the subjects of relations in the policy. The population of the policies was divided into different social and ethnic groups and accordingly had different legal status. Such inequality was the norm, so the priority was given to a policy or state that was enshrined in legislation. However, in Ancient Greece, there were also certain individual rights of citizens such as the right to speak; private property rights; the right to participate in government; the right to hold office; to participate in national meetings; the right to participate in the administration of justice; the right to appeal against illegal acts, etc. In Ancient Rome, this list was supplemented by the right to bargain, freedom of movement, the right of the people's tribune to veto, the ban on torture, the adversarial process of the lawsuit, etc. Keywords: Antiquity period, city-policies, human rights, legal equality, society, justice.


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