Academic literature on the topic 'Jury (Roman law)'

Medieval lawsuits from the highest courts of England and France show the concern of authorities for even minor issues involving ordinary people – a democratic and modern trait. In comparing the English Court of Common Pleas to the Parlement of Paris, it can be seen that classical Roman law made a great impact on France, while the English Court ignored Roman law and applied English customary law and acts of Parliament. The Parlement of Paris also had to apply local customs, but its judges had all studied Roman and no customary law at the university; however, for political reasons they were not allowed to refer openly to the Roman law in which they had been educated. The jury was a major medieval contribution to modern democratic thinking, as was the political idea that matters concerning the whole community ought to be decided by all its members. The American power-sharing system, between President and Congress, continues the late medieval balance between King and Parliament. English common law was one of the great creations of the Middle Ages and the only system of comparable importance is continental civil law (with Germanic and Roman roots). This paper considers the chances of the elaboration in the 21st century of a common European law combining elements from both traditions.

<p><em><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: medium;">End of life law and policy reform is the subject of much discussion around the world. This paper explores the pathways to permissive legal regimes that have been tried in various common law jurisdictions. These include legislation, prosecutorial charging guidelines, court challenges, jury nullification, the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in the absence of offence-specific charging guidelines, and the exercise of judicial discretion in sentencing. In this paper, I describe these pathways as taken (or attempted) in five common law jurisdictions (USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) and reflect briefly on lessons that can be drawn from the recent experiences with law reform in Canada. Through its bird’s eye view, it highlights the remarkable number and variable nature of past attempts at law reform and suggests a shifting tide. It debunks some common myths that have either limited or stymied reform in the past. Finally, it illuminates jurisdictional similarities and differences and lessons learned by those who have gone before so as to inform choices about pathways to pursue for those who will seek to advance a law reform agenda in the future.</span></em></p>

In 149 B.C. the tribune L. Calpurnius Piso proposed a law which was to have momentous consequences for the legal, political and administrative history of the Roman republic. It was his lex de rebus repetundis which first established the practice of trial before a quaestio perpetua, a jury, drawn from a panel of jurors who had always to be available, which became the standard procedure for criminal cases in the late republic. For over fifty years, from the first tribunate of C. Gracchus in 123 to the passing of the Lex Aurelia in 70, such courts were to provide a political storm-centre as various political figures attempted for their own ends to alter the criteria for the selection of the iudices who manned the juries. Moreover, from the late second century B.C. down to at least the second century A.D., the process de repetundis formed the most important means that was available to Rome's provincial subjects of bringing an action against a provincial governor for maladministration.

ROMAN LAW AS A PART OF THE ENGLISH DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE INTERNATIONAL LAWSummary This paper presents views on the role played by Roman Law as a factor in creating the roots of international law which developed within the English legal doctrine from the 16,h to the 19th century. In addition, it exemplifies applications of the institutions of Roman law in international legal practice. The general theory discounts the influence of Roman law on the British system of law. This, however, should be reviewed, as the evidence shows that Roman law has always played a vital role in the English legal system (e. g. Courts of Chancery, Admiralty, Constable and Marshall, Ecclesiastical Courts, Doctors’ Commons organisation). The Roman influences on the doctrine of English international law (Gentilis, Zouche, Duck, Wiseman, Westlake, Maine, Phillimore) indicate a positive, or even enthusiastic attitude towards the use of Roman law as a source of international law. One of the public branches where English practitioners and theorists of civil law could always find employment was in HM Foreign Service, which had a strong need for lawyers qualified in Roman law who were often educated and trained at English universities.One of the earliest authors describing the use of the theory and practice of Roman law in international law was Alberigo Gentili. Although he was Italian, his professional life and career was bound to England as both a Regius Professor at Oxford University and as a legal counsellor for the Privy Council. He gained much prominence and his works on international law, De Jure Belli, De Legationibus and Advocationis Hispanicae have become frequently quoted in the theory of international law. Another Oxford Regius Professor, and a judge in the Admiralty Court, Sir Richard Zouche, together with Gentili and Grotius, is regarded as the father of international law. Among his many works, Jus inter Gentes and Juris et Judicii Fecialis illustrate the influences of Roman law on the developing theory (and practice) of international law. The Roman ideas are particularly visible in Jus Inter Gentes, where Zouche had used the Roman systematic of status, dominium., delictum and judicium to classify and explain international law theory. Another 17th century civil lawyer, Sir Robert Wiseman, in The Excellency o f the Civil Law above all other Human Law glorifies the Roman law as universal law for all nations, applicable to many international debates. One of the most famous British civilians and international law experts, Sir Henry Maine considered the Roman law as an important resource and element of the 19th century doctrine of international law. According to Sir Robert Phillimore, the Roman law could be used in the controversies between independent States. As an example he described the cases between the USA and Spain concerning navigation in the Mississipi River, boundary disputes and arbitration. He proposed application of the Roman law to numerous cases concerning overseas properties.Apart from theory, hundreds of international cases bear traces of successful application of the Roman law to resolve situations when there was no actual law institution to bridge the legal divide. This paper presents five international cases in which an important role was played by Roman law. Arbitration of the Behring Sea dispute in 1893, where the UK and the USA argued about the UK’s right to hunt seals outside the three miles boundary area of the Pribilof s Isles. Both sides used arguments based on Roman law. The Americans view was that seals born on the isles would always return to the shore, not losing animus revertendi of Roman law, thus not becoming res nullius and not subject to „occupation” by the UK fishermen. The British delegates claimed that the seals were born ferae naturae (another Roman law category), and so everyone should be entitled to hunt them.The Alaskan Boundary Tribunal proceedings of 1903 declared that Roman law rules, as a source of international law, should take precedence over the rules of common law.During the Venezuelan arbitration before the Hague Tribunal in 1903, the opponents dealt with many Roman law institutes (like pignus> hypotheca, cessio bonorum, negotiorum gestio and others), trying to adjust them to their actual position.In 1910 the Arbitration Tribunal concerning fishing on the North Atlantic coast allowed the Roman definition of servitude and attempted to treat a state’s territory as a Roman property.The last case dealt with in the paper is the famous Indian Oil Corp. Ltd v. Greenstone Shipping dispute of 1987. The British judge applied the Roman law of confusioy declaring that no previous common law precedent was applicable to this case in which crude oil had been accidentally mixed on board the tanker.Taking into consideration these examples, one may draw the conclusion that Roman law has been an inspiration for European lawyers, as well as English common lawyers, in both the theory and practice of international law.

Abstract 'Urban' tenancy law? The Roman rental market between price mechanism and intervention. Renting a flat in Roman times did not come cheap. The Roman jurists left the determination of the merces up to the parties to the locatio conductio and permitted them to circumvent each other in the course of the contract negotiations (se invicem circumscribere) – a rule that at first glance seems to privilege the landlord. In this paper, it is suggested that the system of sub-rent of insulae and the standardized Roman rental year, starting each year at the calends of July, contributed to a reduction in asymmetry of bargaining power between landlord and tenant. Only in exceptional cases there were external interventions in the price mechanism: In the perils of the civil war, Julius Caesar and Octavian issued laws remitting the annual rent below 500 sesterces for the inhabitants of Italy and below 2,000 sesterces for those of the city of Rome. In conclusion, these structures and rules show that in this regard, Roman tenancy law was specifically designed with a view to the inhabitants of the city of Rome and thus can be qualified as 'urban' law.

The International Law Commission held its fifty-fifth session in Geneva from May 5 to June 6, and from July 7 to August 8, 2003, under the chairmanship of Enrique Candioti of Argentina. The Commission elected Roman Kolodkin of the Russian Federation, Constantin Economides of Greece, Teodor Melescanu of Romania, and Michael Matheson of the United States to fill the vacancies resulting from the death of Valery Kuznetsov of the Russian Federation, the election of Bruno Simma of Germany and Peter Tomka of Slovakia to the International Court of Justice, and the resignation of Robert Rosenstock of the United States.

In July 455adthe Roman general Eparchius Avitus was proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in Arles. Avitus’ son-in-law, Sidonius Apollinaris, delivered a panegyric to mark the new emperor’s first consulship. In this poem Avitus controls hisirato repel the barbarians and counter their fear inducing behaviour. Avitus’ manipulation of the barbarians relies onauctoritasrather than eloquence. Sidonius styles Avitus as an impressive military and political leader, ideally suited to confronting the Vandals and restoring a broken Roma to her former glory.

I believe that no country ever stood so much in need of a code of laws as India; and I believe also that there never was a country in which the want might so easily be supplied. I said that there were many points of analogy between the state of that country after the fall of the Mogul power, and the state of Europe after the fall of the Roman empire. In one respect the analogy is very striking.As there were in Europe then, so there are in India now, several systems of law widely differing from each other, but coexisting and coequal. The indigenous population has its own laws. Each of the successive races of conquerors has brought with it its own peculiar jurisprudence: the Mussulman his Koran and the innumerable commentators on the Koran; the Englishman his Statute Book and his Term Reports. As there were established in Italy, at one and the same time, the Roman Law, the Lombard law, the Ripuarian law, the Bavarian law, and the Salic law, so we have now in our Eastern empire Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other, varying with the person, varying with the place.–Thomas Babington MacaulayOn July 10 1833, in his lengthy and famous speech on the “Government of India” delivered to the House of Commons, Thomas Babington Macaulay offered a brief but fascinating spatial-temporal assessment of the exigencies confronting British legal reform in India. As his above-cited remarks suggest, Macaulay was well acquainted with the subcontinent's rich landscape of multiple legalities and was particularly attuned to the challenges this legal plurality posed to British rule. At the same time, his observations serve as an astute testament to law's travels. Macaulay's speech addressed a range of politically charged issues, including allegations of scandal and corruption surrounding the East India Company's administration. By the end, however, he turned from justifying and defending Company pursuits to persuading an attentive Parliament about the necessity and merits of legal codification. Given Macaulay's unwavering belief in the superiority of Britain (and Europe)—most clearly articulated in his developmentalist analogy between “Europe then” and “India now”—the most plausible itinerary of law's movements was a unidirectional one: law originated in metropolitan London and moved outward to India and elsewhere. However, in advancing his case for codification, Macaulay inadvertently exposed many other laws and their respective circuits of travel. India was difficult to govern precisely because it was a terrain of legal mobility; the residues of other people, places, and times produced a polyglot existence of “Hindoo law, Mahometan law, Parsee law, English law, perpetually mingling with each other and disturbing each other.” What India needed most, Macaulay urged, was a systematized, standardized, and codified rule of law that was to be introduced and imposed by the British: “A code is almost the only blessing, perhaps it is the only blessing, which absolute governments are better fitted to confer on a nation than popular governments.”

The life of John Selden (1584–1654) was both contemplative and active. Seventeenth-century England’s most learned person, he continued in the Long Parliament of the 1640s his vigorous opposition, begun in the 1620s, to the abuses of power, whether by Charles I or, later, by the Presbyterian-controlled Westminster Assembly. His gift for finding analogies among different cultures—Greco-Roman, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic—helped to transform both the poetry and prose of the century’s greatest poet, John Milton. Regarding family law, the two might have influenced one another. Milton cites Selden, and Selden owned two of Milton’s treatises on divorce, published in 1645, both of them presumably acquired while he was writing Uxor Ebraica (1646). Selden accepted the non-biblically rabbinic, externally imposed, coercive Adamic/Noachide precepts as universal laws of perpetual obligation, rejecting his predecessor Hugo Grotius’ view of natural law as the innate result of right reason. He employed rhetorical strategies in De Jure Naturali et Gentium (“The Law of Nature and of Nations”) to prepare his readers for what might otherwise have shocked them: his belief in classic rabbinic law (halakha) as authoritative testimony. Although Selden was very active in the Long Parliament, his only surviving debates from that decade were as a lay member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines. The Assembly’s scribe left so many gaps that the transcript is sometimes indecipherable. This book fills in the gaps and makes the speeches coherent by finding their contexts in Selden’s printed works, both the scholarly, as in the massive De Synedriis, but also in the witty and informal Table Talk.

Le XIXe siècle a un an lorsque Charles-Ferdinand Morel et Isabelle de Gélieu unissent leur destinée. Dès lors, ils formeront un couple en vue grâce à leurs multiples activités sociales, religieuses, politiques, artistiques et littéraires. De nombreuses personnalités de passage dans le Jura bernois s’arrêtent dans leur demeure, un lieu de rencontres, d’échanges sur l’art et la littérature, de débats sur les idées nouvelles. Les réalisations auxquelles le Doyen Morel a contribué – la création d’une caisse centrale des pauvres, d’une caisse d’épargne et d’un orphelinat, la rédaction d’une constitution, l’élevage de mérinos – amorcent des évolutions qui marqueront les sociétés futures par leur audace. Quant à Isabelle de Gélieu, notoriété lui est acquise par ses romans et ses traductions littéraires. Mais derrière cette façade de vie mondaine, qu’en est-il de l’intimité du couple ? Interrogeant les frontières entre vie privée et vie publique, vie cachée et vie visible, sept historiennes et historiens offrent une approche renouvelée de ces deux personnages et de leur siècle. L’image qui en ressort est plus contrastée que celle présentée jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Mari et femme vivent côte à côte mais à la lecture des écrits d’Isabelle, on saisit que l’amour n’est plus présent. Dès lors, comment continuer à vivre ensemble sans s’aimer ? Comment trouver l’énergie pour créer, lorsque les difficultés financières, les disputes et une forme d’indifférence envahissent le quotidien ?

This chapter traces the origins and development of the civil law legal tradition, which assigns to judges only a mechanical, highly constrained form of decision-making. The civil law legal tradition is characterized globally by a historical reliance on Roman law; a modern rationalist code and no body of judge-made case law under the code; textualism and formalism; and the absence of jury trial and an inquisitorial approach to civil and criminal procedure. The civil law tradition allows judicial review, which has been seen as being inherently political, to be exercised soley by a separate institution, called a Constitutional Court, which alone interprets and enforces the Constitution and which is de facto the most important court in the country, even though de jure there are coequal courts of cassation and councils of state. Traditionally, judges received little social deference and were low on the hierarchy of status in civil law countries, whereas scholars and codifiers came first. The civil law legal tradition conceives of the separation of powers in a very wooden, ahistorical way that precludes judges from ever making policy by deciding administrative law and constitutional law cases. It was therefore necessary to create powerful constitutional courts as a specially chosen fourth branch of government in order for judicial review to work in civil law countries. The chapter conclude by looking at the court systems in civil law countries, which typically have three supreme courts: 1) a constitutional court; 2) a court of cassation; and 3) a council of state.

The author examines the crime of parricide, its legal regulation, and the penalty of the sack. It belonged to the Roman tradition for a manifest perpetrator who confessed his crime. Those who were sentenced in a jury trial were exiled according to the lex Cornelia de siccariis and probably also under the lex Pompeia de parriciddis. Under Constantine the penalty of the sack became a regular sanction laid down for parricide. The exact way it was carried out was not prescribed but was subject to the circumstances and possibilities.

This chapter talks about Nouveau Roman, which was once again given collective visibility in the form of a décade at the Château de Cerisy–la–Salle in July 1971. It details the event that was devoted to “Le Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui,” in which the organizers assembled five of the seven novelists who appeared on the famous photo of the Nouveau Roman: Robbe–Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Ollier, Robert Pinget, and Nathalie Sarraute. It also recounts Nathalie's attendance at Gilbert Gadoffre's Rencontres in Loches, where she delivered a short paper titled “Is Proust Topical?” and took active part in the ensuing discussion. The chapter discusses the differences with the Nouveau Roman, structuralist theories of language, and the French left on the matter of Israel that revived Nathalie's long-standing resistance to arguments from authority. It mentions Nathalie's publication of “Fools Say” in 1976, which explores the politics of verbal categorisations.

The burnings of the Reformed Augustinian friars Hendrik Vos and Johann van den Esschen in Brussels on 1 July 1523 were the first executions of the Protestant Reformation. This chapter challenges the notion that they were peripheral to the key events of the early Reformation. Personal connections and frequent interactions existed between the Reformed Augustinians in the Low Countries (=Lower Germany) and those in Wittenberg, where Martin Luther was a member; the individuals responsible for the executions were intimates of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and Popes Leo X and Adrian VI. An awareness of these connections raises questions about the importance of this event in the early Reformation and about how that movement functioned in its earliest stages.