The American Legal System: The Administration of Justice in the United States by Judicial, Administrative, Military and Arbitral Tribunals. By Lewis Mayers. (New York: Harper & Brothers. 1955. Pp. ix, 557. $6.50.)

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-235
Author(s):  
Carl Q. Christol
2020 ◽  
pp. 88-109
Author(s):  
Russell Crandall

This chapter recounts how the United States in the nineteenth century permitted considerable personal freedom of choice regarding drugs, citing the idiosyncrasies of the U.S. Constitution that helped ensure potent forms of opium, cocaine, and cannabis remained widely available nationwide. It talks about how the American legal system made states responsible for regulating drugs, particularly opium and cannabis, on their own turf. It also discusses how most states and several major cities by 1910 had anti-drug laws wherein ritual police raids were a hallmark of the states' haphazard enforcement schemes. The chapter recounts the first efforts at drug control at the federal level, which were designed not to break up underground dealer networks but to regulate the runaway pharmaceutical market. It refers to the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, which simply mandated that certain active ingredients meet standardized purity requirements and forced drug makers to label in a clear way any of ten ingredients considered unsafe.


Author(s):  
Pamela Hobbs

AbstractLegal humor is a topic of perennial appeal, and has long been a prolific source of books, articles, and scholarly commentaries which are avidly consumed by popular and professional audiences alike. However, although a number of scholars have analyzed the use of humor in judicial opinions, there is no comparable body of scholarly examinations of lawyers' use of humor in their role as legal advocates. This omission is significant, because in the American legal system, humor and wordplay serve as highly-valued evidence of forensic skill which is deemed appropriate for display both within and outside of the courtroom. Accordingly, this paper attempts to fill the gap in the existing literature by examining attorneys' use of humor as persuasive advocacy in two widely divergent settings, informal court-mandated mediation and oral argument before the United States Supreme Court. In these data, the attorneys use humor aggressively to ridicule the plaintiffs' claims, depicting them as laughable and unworthy of serious consideration, while placing themselves at the center of a comic performance which allows them to display their linguistic skills. These data thus demonstrate that humor can be a potent weapon in an attorney's arsenal.


2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-90
Author(s):  
S.M. Salikhova ◽  
◽  
A.M. Shakhaeva ◽  

The relevance of the consideration of the problem of civil liability for harm caused by goods with increased hazardous properties is determined by the fact that such cases occupy an increasingly important place in judicial practice. This shows that not only the legal awareness of citizens is growing, but the very definition of “goods with increased dangerous properties” does not have all the principles of specificity. In this regard, one can turn to the experience of other countries, especially those where consumer protection has proven effective. The United States is one of such countries, where not only the culture of consumption is high, but also the legal culture. This combination allows the American legal system to respond to citizens ’appeals in a timely manner and resolve issues with an objective review of cases where liability for damage caused by goods with increased dangerous properties is considered. In the United States, the definition of civil liability for manufacturers and sellers of goods and services is governed by federal and state laws. Moreover, it is the laws of the states in most cases that govern the most important aspects related to determining the shortage of goods, services and work. It should be noted the importance of the precedent in the US legal system, which also determines many cases for determining civil liability for harm caused by some properties of goods. To compare the fundamentals of the legislation of the two countries in the studied area, the comparative legal research method was applied, which allows us to highlight general and excellent legislative norms. Based on the results of the comparison, it was concluded that the similarities and differences between the American and Russian legislation in terms of civil-steam liability for damage caused by goods with dangerous properties.


Author(s):  
Patrick W. Carey

The chapter demonstrates how Catholic sacramental confession influenced the American legal system and expanded the notion of religious liberty in the United States. It describes a precedent-setting legal decision in New York City in 1813 on the confessional seal—that is, the priest’s canonical obligation to preserve the secrecy of a penitent’s confession of sins. A New York court in People v. Phillips declared that a priest who had learned of a crime through a penitent’s confession of sins was not obliged to reveal that information in a court trial. That legal decision was periodically cited in subsequent court cases in the United States and laid the grounds for subsequent statutory laws in various states that protected in particular the confessional seal and more generally clerical confidentiality. The legal case also became the occasion for the first major American Catholic apologetical attempt to defend the Catholic understanding of sacramental confession.


1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-131
Author(s):  
C. G. Schoenfeld

Numerous examples of the clearly excessive discretionary powers that now saturate the American legal system are discussed. The dangers that these discretionary powers pose are explored with the aid of psychoanalytic discoveries, particularly concerning man's moral faculty or superego. These psychoanalytic discoveries are also employed in an effort to determine how such discretionary powers might be limited or structured so that the United States remains, as much as possible, a government of laws and not of men.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document