"recht erzählen"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Stolleis

Anyone engaged in "narrating the law" moves in the border area between scientific work and fictional narration. It is a balancing act not to falsify the expression of historical actors handed down in sources and to convey them as legal history(s) to one's own contemporaries. In this volume, Michael Stolleis chooses the path of vivid individual cases that combine to form a Palatine panorama. The arc of the regional studies set on the Rhine and Neckar stretches from early modern times to the 19th century. We encounter Palatine wedding couples, Frankfurt lawyers, silk farmers, the fates of migrants and the way the authorities dealt with beggars in the Electoral Palatinate. The tense relationship between Bavaria and the Palatinate came to a head in the Palatinate-Baden uprising (1849). The fact that a Neustadt ropemaker named Georg Stolleis appears among the revolters is only one surprising detail of these rich narratives of the law.

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-671
Author(s):  
Anthony Murphy ◽  

The struggle between testamentary freedom and family protection is one of the enduring challenges in the field of succession law. This paper is exclusively concerned with the Civilian tradition, where efforts to bridge the gap between said ideals generally follow two main models. Some legal systems maintain the Roman model of allowing the testator or testatrix to lift the forced heirship in cases strictly provided by the law, whilst others prefer the Napoleonic paradigm of depriving the deceased of said power. Romanian succession law has experienced both models, with the former dominating the medieval and early modern law and the latter only introduced in the second half of the 19th century, with the legal transplant of the Code Napoléon. The present study argues that certain changes introduced in the Civil Code of 2009, specifically empowering the decedent to lift the effects of unworthiness and explicitly regulating the regime of disinheritance, foreshadow a return to the Roman paradigm.


Author(s):  
Irina Podgorny

In the long view of history, the charlatan is a merchant in unconventional knowledge defined on the basis of his itinerant existence. Traveling from one marketplace to another, dealing in exotic objects and remedies, organizing shows and exhibitions, performing miraculous healings by appealing to the curative power of words and liniments, charlatans have traversed Europe since early modern times. Charlatans also crossed the boundaries between popular and learned cultures. Both celebrated and opposed by physicians, scientists and philosophers, the rich and the poor, women and men, they circulated and traded knowledge and artifacts, penetrating the most diverse cultural spheres. Far from being confined to certain countries or regions, they were everywhere, repeating almost the same sales strategies, words, and performances. The repetition of fictitious stories down the centuries and on different continents raises the question of assessing the persistence of tradition in such different contexts. Charlatans were able not only to discover what local people liked but also to speak their “local language,” as well as adopting the most sophisticated technological innovations as part of their performances. They were sharp observers of traditions and habits in the settings they visited, and they reacted quickly to what was new for attracting audiences and customers. One can say that charlatans combined very ancient products with the most innovative media.


Author(s):  
Patricia Faraldo-Cabana

The genealogy of pecuniary punishments is a story of constant reformulation in response to shifting political pressures, changes in institutional and administrative arrangements, and intellectual developments that changed ideological commitments of legislators and practitioners. Within this chronicle of reformulation, broad transformations since the late 17th century are discernible. These legal transformations, most of which have been widely discussed and debated, help delimitate old and new forms of punishment and, to some degree, different modes of constructing punishment inside the criminal law. Based on the notion that the legal discussions during the 19th century set the stage for the profound reforms initiated by the emergence of consumer societies, the discourses that unfolded from around the end of early modern times until now are analyzed, even though few could have predicted the increase in the use of fines and confiscation that would occur throughout the 20th century. For the fine to reach such a state of ubiquity, one of its most criticized characteristics derived from its monetary nature had to undergo a severe scrutiny: the unequal impact on offenders caused by the unequal distribution of money between individuals in society. Confiscation, on the other hand, after having being extensively used by the Nazi, fascist, and Francoist regimes against “people’s enemies” and political opponents, was rediscovered as one of the most powerful weapons in the fight against organized crime during the war on drugs in the 1980s. In the 21st century it has become increasingly important for countries to be able to freeze and confiscate property related to the committing of an offense, thus depriving criminals of their illicitly obtained assets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-250
Author(s):  
Stephanie Dropuljic

This article examines the role of women in raising criminal actions of homicide before the central criminal court, in early modern Scotland. In doing so, it highlights the two main forms of standing women held; pursing an action for homicide alone and as part of a wider group of kin and family. The evidence presented therein challenges our current understanding of the role of women in the pursuit of crime and contributes to an under-researched area of Scots criminal legal history, gender and the law.


Author(s):  
Elia Nathan Bravo

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. On the one hand, it offers a general analysis of stigmas (a person has one when, in virtue of its belonging to a certain group, such as that of women, homosexuals, etc., he or she is subjugated or persecuted). On the other hand, I argue that stigmas are “invented”. More precisely, I claim that they are not descriptive of real inequalities. Rather, they are socially created, or invented in a lax sense, in so far as the real differences to which they refer are socially valued or construed as negative, and used to justify social inequalities (that is, the placing of a person in the lower positions within an economic, cultural, etc., hierarchy), or persecutions. Finally, I argue that in some cases, such as that of the witch persecution of the early modern times, we find the extreme situation in which a stigma was invented in the strict sense of the word, that is, it does not have any empirical content.


Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.


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