Placed uniquely at the intersection of common law and civil law, mixed legal systems are today attracting the attention both of scholars of comparative law, and of those concerned with the development of a European private law. Pre-eminent among the mixed legal systems are those of Scotland and South Africa. In South Africa the Roman-Dutch law, brought to the Cape by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 was, from the early nineteenth century onwards, infused with and re-moulded by the common law of the British imperial master. In Scotland a more gradual and elusive process saw the Roman-Scots law of the early modern period fall under the influence of English law after the Act of Union in 1707. The result, in each case, was a system of law which drew from both of the great European traditions whilst containing distinctive elements of its own. This volume sets out to compare the effects of this historical development by assessing whether shared experience has led to shared law. Key topics from the law of property and obligations are examined, collaboratively and comparatively, by teams of leading experts from both jurisdictions. The individual chapters reveal an intricate pattern of similarity and difference, enabling courts and legal writers in Scotland and South Africa to learn from the experience of a kindred jurisdiction. They also, in a number of areas, reveal an emerging and distinctive jurisprudence of mixed systems, and thus suggest viable answers to some of the great questions which must be answered on the path towards a European private law.

The second edition of Children s Testimony is a fully up-to-date resource for practitioners and researchers working in forensic contexts and concerned with children's ability to provide reliable testimony about abuse. * Written for both practitioners and researchers working in forensic contexts, including investigative interviewers, police officers, lawyers, judges, expert witnesses, and social workers * Explores a range of issues involved with children's testimony and their ability to provide reliable testimony about experienced or witnessed events, including abuse * Avoids jargon and highly technical language * Includes a comprehensive range of contributions from an international group of practitioners and researchers to ensure topicality and relevance

Drawing on Foucauldian theory and 'social harm' paradigms, Michael Naughton offers a radical redefinition of miscarriages of justice from a critical perspective. This book uncovers the limits of the entire criminal justice process and challenges the dominant perception that miscarriages of justices are rare and exceptional cases of wrongful imprisonment.

Can punishments ever meaningfully be proportioned in severity to the seriousness of the crimes for which they are imposed? A great deal of attention has been paid to the general justification of punishment, but the thorny practical questions have received significantly less. Serious analysis has seldom delved into what makes crimes more or less serious, what makes punishments more or less severe, and how links are to be made between them. In Of One-eyed and Toothless Miscreants, Michael Tonry has gathered together a distinguished cast of contributors to offer among the first sustained efforts to specify with precision how proportionality can be understood in relation to the implementation of punishment. Each chapter examines scholarly and lay thinking about punishment of people convicted of crimes with particular emphasis on "making the punishment fit the crime." The contributors challenge the most prevalent current theories and emphasize the need for a shift away from the politicized emotionalism of recent decades. They argue that theories that coincided with mass incarceration and rampant injustice to countless individuals are evolving in ways that better countenance moving toward more humane and thoughtful approaches. Written by many of the leading thinkers on punishment, this volume dissects previously undeveloped issues related to considerations of deserved punishment and provides new ways to understand both the severities of punishment and the seriousness of crime.

This open access book examines whether a distinctly Nordic procedural or court culture exists and what the hallmarks of that culture are. Do Nordic courts and court proceedings share a distinct set of ideas and values that in combination constitute the core of a regional legal culture? How do Europeanisation, privatisation, diversification and digitisation influence courts and court proceedings in the Nordic countries? The book traces the genesis and formation of Nordic courts and justice systems to provide a richer comprehension of contemporary Nordic legal culture, and an understanding of the relationship between legal cultural stability and change. In answering these questions, the book provides models for conceptualising procedural culture. Nordic procedural culture has partly developed organically and is partly also the product of deliberate efforts to maintain a certain level of alignment between the Nordic countries. Studying Nordic cooperation enables us to gain a deeper understanding of current regional, European and global harmonisation processes within procedural law. The influx of supranational European law, increased use of alternative dispute resolution and growth in regulation density that produces a conflict between specialisation and coherence, have tangible impact on the role of courts in a democratic society, the form of court proceedings and court structures. This book examines whether and why some trends exert more tangible, or perhaps simply more perceptible, influence on procedural culture than others.

This book seeks to understand how women judges are situated as legal knowers on the High Court of Australia by asking whether a near-equal gender balance on the High Court has disrupted the Court's historically masculinist gender regime. This book examines how the High Court's gender regime operates once there is more than one woman on the bench. It explores the following questions: How have the Court's gender relations accommodated the presence women on the bench? How have the women themselves accommodated those pre-existing gender relations? How might legal judgments and reasoning change as a result of changing gender dynamics on the bench? To develop answers to these (and other) questions the book pursues a methodology that conceptualises the High Court as an institution with a particular gender regime shaped historically by the dominant gender order of the wider society. The intersection between the (gendered) individuals and the (gendered) institution in which they operate produces and reproduces that institution's gender regime. Hence, the enquiry is not so much asking 'have women judges made a difference?' but rather is asking how should we understand women judges' relationship with the law, a relationship that is shaped as much by the individual judge as by the institutional context in which they operate. Scholars, legal practitioners and researchers interested in judicial reasoning, gender diversity and the legal profession, gender and politics will be interested in this book because it breaks new ground as a case study of a Court's gender regime at a particular time.

Originally published in 1973 The Law Courts of Medieval England looks at law courts as the most developed institutions existing in the medieval times. Communities crystallized upon them and the governments worked through them. This book describes the scope and procedures of the different courts, appointment of the judges, the beginnings of civil and criminal courts, the origin of the jury system and other aspects of the modern legal system. It is all shown by an analysis of actual reports of court cases of the time, giving a vivid picture of the life of the English people as well as of the ways of the professional lawyers, no less intricate than they are today.

This book reinvigorates the field of socio-legal inquiry examining the relationship between law and demography. Originally conceived as 'population law' in the 1960s following a growth in population and a use of law to temper population growth, this book takes a new approach by examining how population change can affect the legal system, rather than the converse. It analyses the impact of demographic change on the judicial system, with a geographic focus on Australian courts but with global insights and it raises questions about institutional structures. Through four case studies, it examines how demographic change impacts on the judicial system and how should the judicial system adapt to embody a greater preparedness for the demographic changes that lie ahead? It makes recommendations for reform and speaks to applied demographers, socio-legal scholars, and those interested in judicial institutions.

Obtaining justice through Japan's civil justice system requires a nuanced understanding of Japanese legal culture, particularly the fundamental differences between the notion of individual rights that underlies American law and the adversarial system, and the deeply ingrained sense of 'group rights' and conciliation that is becoming more a part of the way law in Japan is actually practiced. This timely guide is unique in relating modern civil procedure to aspects of Japanese society from both the feudal and prewar period. Particularly useful for the busy practitioner is the checklist of differing societal and cultural approaches of the American and Japanese systems that have major impact on current legal practices.
Also includes an in-depth analysis of:
The philosophical bent of the supreme court
How the judicial system has responded to the demands of the urban population
How new reforms in lawyer training are expected to improve the civil justice system
Contemporary avenues and uses of Alternative Dispute Resolution.

The Dispute Settlement Reports of the World Trade Organization (WTO) include Panel and Appellate Body reports, as well as arbitration awards, in disputes concerning the rights and obligations of WTO Members under the provisions of the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization. These are the only authorized paginated reports in English. As such, they are an essential addition to the library of every practising and academic trade lawyer, and will be widely consulted by students taking courses in international economic or trade law. The WTO authorized printed DSR volumes commenced publication with DSR, 1996: I. Publication of the Cambridge printed edition follows the WTO website publication of all new reports, which will continue in the three working languages of English, French and Spanish. Once a report has been released on the WTO website it will be published in the next Cambridge printed volume

This innovative work builds on Huff and Killias' earlier publication (2008), but is broader and more thoroughly comparative in a number of important ways: (1) while focusing heavily on wrongful convictions, it places the subject of wrongful convictions in the broader contextual framework of miscarriages of justice and provides discussions of different types of miscarriages of justice that have not previously received much scholarly attention by criminologists; (2) it addresses, in much greater detail, the questions of how, and how often, wrongful convictions occur; (3) it provides more in-depth consideration of the role of forensic science in helping produce wrongful convictions and in helping free those who have been wrongfully convicted; (4) it offers new insights into the origins and current progress of the innocence movement, as well as the challenges that await the exonerated when they return to "free" society; (5) it assesses the impact of the use of alternatives to trials (especially plea bargains in the U.S. and summary proceedings and penal orders in Europe) in producing wrongful convictions; (6) it considers how the U.S. and Canada have responded to 9/11 and the increased threat of terrorism by enacting legislation and adopting policies that may exacerbate the problem of wrongful conviction; and (7) it provides in-depth considerations of two topics related to wrongful conviction: voluntary false confessions and convictions which, although technically not wrongful since they are based on law violations, represent another type of miscarriage of justice since they are due solely to unjust laws resulting from political repression.

This book examines the issue of foreign investor misconduct in modern international investment law, focusing on the approach that international investment law as it currently operates has developed towards foreign investor misconduct. The term 'misconduct' is not a legal notion, but is used to describe a certain phenomenon, namely, a group/class of actions. This term is convenient since it makes it possible to introduce and describe the phenomenon as such, without a division into concrete types of conduct, like 'abuse of process', 'violation of national law', 'corruption', 'investment contrary to international norms and standards', etc. The term 'misconduct' is intended to embrace various kinds of conduct on the part of foreign investors that the system of international investment law does not accept - such as that which it regards as illegal, against public policy, or otherwise inappropriate - and triggers legal consequences. Rarely, however, does international investment law clearly articulate what it considers unacceptable investor conduct, and certainly not in any systematic fashion. As such, this book addresses the following questions: What types of investors' conduct are legally unacceptable? What mechanisms are available to deal with unacceptable investors' conduct, and what are the legal consequences?

This is the second volume in a new series designed to cover the previously-neglected inquisitions post mortem of the fifteenth century between 1422 and 1485. Inquisitions post mortem were compiled with the help of jurors from the area, as a county-by-county record of a deceased individual's land-holdings and associated rights, where the individual held land directly of the crown. It is this explicit connection with land and locality - in terms economic, social, political, and topographical - that makes these documents of comprehensive interest to a broad range of historians and archaeologists. The inclusion of jurors' names and full manorial extents is standard in the new series as is the calendaring of information offered by the associated writs. Analogous documents consist of proofs of age, of particular interest to historians of memory, and assignments of dower. CLAIRE NOBLE is a Research Associate, Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. Academic Director and General Editor: CHRISTINE CARPENTER

Innovations in Evidence and Proof brings together fifteen leading scholars and experienced law teachers based in Australia, Canada, Northern Ireland, Scotland, South Africa, the USA and England and Wales to explore and debate the latest developments in Evidence and Proof scholarship. The essays comprising this volume range expansively over questions of disciplinary taxonomy, pedagogical method and computer-assisted learning, doctrinal analysis, fact-finding, techniques of adjudication, the ethics of cross-examination, the implications of behavioural science research for legal procedure, human rights, comparative law and international criminal trials. Communicating the breadth, dynamism and intensity of contemporary theoretical innovation in their diversity of subject-matter and approach, the authors nonetheless remain united by a common purpose: to indicate how the best interdisciplinary theorising and research might be integrated directly into degree-level Evidence teaching. Innovations in Evidence and Proof is published at an exciting time of theoretical renewal and increasing empirical sophistication in legal evidence, proof and procedure scholarship. This groundbreaking collection will be essential reading for Evidence teachers, and will also engage the interest and imagination of scholars, researchers and students investigating issues of evidence and proof in any legal system, municipal, transnational or global.

Underpinned by a hybrid methodology (ranging from social sciences to human sciences), this book parses mediation in four perspectives, which stands as an unparalleled methodological approach so far. Mediation has long been tethered to piecemeal and haphazard approaches, which have flatly failed to capture the gist of the uniqueness of this (often) poorly latched on (and poorly understood) dispute resolution mechanism. This book argues that, in order to fully grasp the richness of such dispute resolution mechanism, mediation must be parsed in four tiers. The first tier is the social dynamics of mediation. The second tier is the cultural dynamics of mediation. The third tier is the legal dynamics of mediation. The fourth tier is the cross-border and cross-cultural dynamics of mediation. Taken together, the four tiers that premise the four-tiered model of mediation seek to unlock the finding in view of which law and social reality are tightly interlocked. In this vein, it is the underlying social reality of a given jurisdiction that should dictate the design of a pre-suit court-connected mandatory mediation with an easy opt-out, a central claim of both social dynamics of mediation (the first tier of the four-tiered model of mediation) and legal dynamics of mediation (the third tier of the four-tiered model of mediation).

This book is the first-ever to explore commercial arbitration in the Ethiopian context. Alternative conflict resolution mechanisms are nothing new to the country: arbitration as a dispute settlement mechanism by which a third party issues a binding decision on a dispute between two or more parties by exercising the jurisdictional mandate conferred on it by the parties themselves was established with the adoption of the Civil Code in 1960. This pioneering book evaluates the extent to which Ethiopia's laws and institutions allow disputing parties to effectively reap the benefits of international commercial arbitration. It interprets the relevant legislation and attempts to bridge the gaps in it, in order to help lawyers, arbitrators, arbitral institutions, academics and judges to understand and apply it. It also helps parties seeking to complete international transactions pertaining to Ethiopia make the right choice regarding conflict resolution.

This book scrutinizes the emergence of historians participating as expert witnesses in historical forensic contribution in some of the most important national and international legal ventures of the last century. It aims to advance the debate from discussions on whether historians should testify or not toward nuanced understanding of the history of the practice and making the best out of its performance in the future.

Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatised "justice." Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules, while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past seventy years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy. As the law bloats into chaos, it staggers on only by excusing itself from the very commands it insists that we obey, leaving Americans at the mercy of arbitrary power. By examining the system as a whole, Gibney shows that the tragedies often portrayed as isolated mistakes or the work of bad actors-police misconduct, prosecutorial overreach, and the outrages of imperial presidencies-are really the inevitable consequences of law's descent into lawlessness. The first book to deliver a lucid, comprehensive overview of the entire legal system, from the grandeur of Constitutional theory to the squalid workings of Congress, The Nonsense Factory provides a deeply researched and witty examination of America's state of legal absurdity, concluding with sensible options for reform.

This book focuses on American political discourse connected to war, dissent, and empathy. Through interdisciplinary methods of history, politics and media studies, the book examines ways in which American self-identity alters as a consequence of media portrayal of human suffering and of its existential others. It compares representations of the Iraq wars to earlier precedents and looks at the work of American activists, assessing how narratives and images of human suffering in new media iconography generate empathic attitudes towards others. This comparative, multimodal study helps to explain shifting self-identities within the U.S, and relationally through the representation of the Arab other presenting an original and historicised contribution to the media-war field of academic and public debate. The book underscores empathy as a vibrant category of analysis that expands how we think about West-Arab relations, revealing how understanding the cultural aspects of this conflictual interrelationship needs to be broadened.

Self-representation has a long, venerable history dating to biblical times and continuing through the common law, the colonial era, to the present. This book collects and analyzes the law, ethics opinions, and empirical studies about the wide range of issues surrounding Self-represented litigants (SRLs) in our justice system, including how much, if any, assistance should a judge provide, what duties do lawyers interacting with SRLs, and many others. Using recent empirical studies from both Civil litigation and criminal defense, Jona Goldschmidt argues that SRLs' cases cannot be fairly heard without a mandatory judicial duty of reasonable assistance. In order to maintain public trust and confidence in our justice system, self-represented parties must be guided and assisted. Courts and the legal profession should continue to adapt and meet the challenge of managing and interacting with those who choose or are compelled to self-represent. Only when self-represented litigants are embraced by the courts, they will finally receive "equal justice under law." This book would be of interest to those studying criminal justice and legal studies, specifically legal history and legal ethics, as well as judges, lawyers and other professionals in the field.

Every day, police deception tactics fool millions of Americans into giving evidence they don't have to give, leading to their arrest and conviction in court because they don't know when and how to take advantage of their absolute constitutional right to remain silent. By the time they hear the Miranda warning, they have already voluntarily given up the evidence the police need to make an arrest by answering questions and taking sobriety tests, and in many cases, they've already guaranteed they'll lose in court. A Toast to Silence focuses on the right time before the Miranda warning to remain silent and not take tests and on the exact word-for-word lies the police cleverly disguise as truths to make people give up evidence-and shows you exactly when and how to use the power of silence to overcome these deceptive tactics for success in court.

This book focuses on the tactics and strategies used in business-to-business contract negotiations. In addition to outlining general negotiation concepts, techniques and tools, it provides insight into relevant framework conditions, underlying mechanisms and also presents generally occurring terms and problems. Moreover, different negotiating styles are illustrated using an exemplary presentation of negotiation peculiarities in China, the USA and Germany. The presented tactics and strategies combine interdisciplinary psychological and economic knowledge as well as findings from the field of communication science. The application scope of these tactics and strategies covers business-to-business negotiations as well as company-internal negotiations. The fact that this book does not necessarily stipulate any prior knowledge of the subject of negotiations also makes it highly suitable for nonprofessionals with a pronounced interested in negotiations. Nonetheless, it provides proficient negotiators with a deeper understanding for situations experienced in negotiations. This book also helps practioners to identify underlying mechanisms and on this basis sustainably improve their negotiation skills.