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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The book provides a comprehensive and principled account of the uncertainty problem that arises in tort litigation. It presents and critically examines the existing doctrinal solutions of the problem, as evolved in England, the United States, Canada, and Israel, and also offers a number of original solutions, such as imposition of collective liability and liability for evidential damage. Among the issues dealt with by the book are rapidly developing areas of tort law, such as mass torts, liability for imposing risk and the like. The book combines the traditional doctrinal depiction of the law with general theoretical insights that include economic analysis.

This book investigates the penal culture in France and Germany – how it is shaped in politics, media, and public opinion. Although compared with the US or the UK, France and Germany seem to place a strong emphasis on the ideal of rehabilitation that would block excessive punishment and other outcomes of punitive developments in society, there is a steady increase in punitiveness over time for which the term “strained restraint” is proposed. The book shows that the idea of penal moderation is deeply rooted in public opinion, politics, and the media and that it is renegotiated every day in a dynamic interplay between these spheres. Punishment and society research has traditionally focused on the US and the UK. In comparative research, both are considered extreme in punitive developments with high rates of imprisonment and large groups of the population under penal control. The other extreme in comparative research would be Scandinavia with the famous Nordic Exceptionalism marked by low prison population rates. Germany and France are often considered to be “the same” when compared with each other, and “the other” with reference to both of these extremes. However, this book shows that France and Germany are far from being the same when it comes to state organization (centralistic vs. federal), criminal justice and the criminal law, political traditions, and the media. Also, research from both countries has looked at whether developments such as the “punitive turn” have occurred in Germany and France. Research focused on the domestic situation concludes that punitiveness is on the rise, and that both countries are indeed experiencing their own punitive turn. How do we reconcile these contradictory findings? Why do these two seem to follow the path of penal moderation in the overall outcome of punishment in society when we look at comparative research? And how is it that from a domestic perspective, punitive attitudes and desires are leading to more punitiveness? By focusing on the meso level, with a comparative perspective on the two countries and a dynamic analytical approach, this book reconciles the fluidity of individual attitudes and opinions with the relative stability of societal discourse. The authors posit that penal moderation comes at a price: overall and in an internationally comparative perspective, there is penal moderation, but a closer look at the domestic situation and development reveals that it is nonetheless challenged by a slowly rising tide of punitiveness. Going beyond the main tenets of punishment and society research with a dynamic analysis of two large societies in Europe, this book is ideal reading for scholars and students of penology, criminal justice, and European studies.

This collection of essays aims to look afresh at an institution which continues to be of central importance to all who are interested in the development of European Union law and policy. The essays seek to develop particular avenues of analysis and perspectives - including a philosophical, a sociological and a gender-based analysis - which, despite the significant increase in the range and volume of literature on the Court of Justice, have not yet been fully explored.

FIDIC contracts are the most widely used contracts for international construction around the world and are used in many different jurisdictions, both common law and civil law. For any construction project, the General Conditions of Contract published by FIDIC may need to be supplemented by Particular Conditions that specify the specific requirements of that project and jurisdiction. FIDIC Contracts in the Americas: A Practical Guide to Application provides readers with an overview of the legal environment, the construction industry and features of contract law applying to construction contracts in a number of jurisdictions in the Americas. It provides detailed guidance for the preparation of the Particular Conditions for FIDIC contracts that will comply with the requirements of the applicable laws that apply to the site where the work is carried out, and for the governing law of the contract. This book also details the impact of COVID-19 on both the execution of construction projects and the operation of construction contracts in each jurisdiction. This book is essential reading for construction professionals, lawyers and students of construction law.

Sentencing is one of the fastest moving areas of law, with frequent legislative changes and hundreds of reported appellate decisions each year. The fourth edition of "Emmins on Sentencing" provides the most comprehensive coverage of modern sentencing law currently available. It offers a clear and authoritative guide to the sentences which are available to the courts and describes the powers of sentencing which can be used and how they are likely to be exercised in practice by the Crown Court or magistrates' courts.;Since the last edition much of sentencing law has been consolidated in the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000, and "Emmins on Sentencing" has been completely rewritten to take account of all these changes. This edition also deals with important reforms in the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000, including the introduction of exclusion orders, disqualification orders and drug abstinence orders. Numerous appellate decisions are explained and discussed in context, such as the developing case law on automatic life sentences, extended sentences, detention and training orders, victim impact evidence, and a range of new sentencing guideline decisions including drug offences, racially aggravated offences and handling stolen goods. The impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on sentencing is explained, including the ramifications of Thompson and Venables v UK. The new Magistrates' Association Guidelines are also set out.

Addresses the relationship between law and the visual and the importance of photography in show trials. Includes case studies from Albania, East Germany, and Poland. Will appeal to legal and cultural theorists.

High Courts and Economic Governance in Argentina and Brazil analyzes how high courts and elected leaders in Latin America interacted over neoliberal restructuring, one of the most significant socioeconomic transformations in recent decades. Courts face a critical choice when deciding cases concerning national economic policy, weighing rule of law concerns against economic imperatives. Elected leaders confront equally difficult dilemmas when courts issue decisions challenging their actions. Based on extensive fieldwork in Argentina and Brazil, this study identifies striking variation in inter-branch interactions between the two countries. In Argentina, while the high court often defers to politicians in the economic realm, inter-branch relations are punctuated by tense bouts of conflict. The Brazilian high court and elected officials, by contrast, routinely accommodate one another in their decisions about economic policy. Diana Kapiszewski argues that the two high courts' contrasting characters - political in Argentina and statesman-like in Brazil - shape their decisions on controversial cases and condition how elected leaders respond to their rulings, channeling inter-branch interactions into persistent patterns.

Waltenburg and Swinford provide a detailed and systematic examination of state government activity before the U.S. Supreme Court. They provide an explanatory model of state litigation behavior that both rests upon a solid theoretical perspective and places state decisions in a larger political context. After an examination of the evolution of U.S. constitutional law on issues of direct state concern, Waltenburg and Swinford focus most of their attention on qualitative and quanitative analyses of the behavior over time of states in all their roles before the Court. Scholars and other researchers interested in judicial decision-making, Constitutional Law, and inter-governmental relations will find this a particularly useful study.

While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience argues that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other talented individuals who, despite the disorienting dilemma of incarceration, are models of adult transformative learning that positively impact the world. The authors interweave narratives with both qualitative and quantitative research references to analyze the role of solitude, writing, non-verbal communication; race and gender; physical exercise; education; technology; family and parenting; and the need to "give back" that precipitate transformative learning. The prison cell becomes a counterspace of metamorphosis. In focusing upon how men and women have chosen the worst moments of their lives as a baseline not to define, but to refine themselves, Gifts from the Dark promises to forever alter the limited mindset of incarceration as a solely one-dimensional, deficit event.

Punishment policies and practices in the United States today are unprincipled, chaotic, and much too often unjust. The financial costs are enormous. The moral cost is greater: countless individual injustices, mass incarceration, the world's highest imprisonment rate, extreme disparities, especially affecting members of racial and ethnic minority groups, high rates of wrongful conviction, assembly line case processing, and a general absence of respectful consideration of offenders' interests, circumstances, and needs. In Doing Justice, Preventing Crime, Michael Tonry lays normative and empirical foundations for building new, more just, and more effective systems of sentencing and punishment in the twenty-first century. The overriding goals are to treat people convicted of crimes justly, fairly, and even-handedly; to take sympathetic account of the circumstances of peoples' lives; and to punish no one more severely than he or she deserves. Drawing on philosophy and punishment theory, this book explains the structural changes needed to uphold the rule of law and its requirement that the human dignity of every person be respected. In clear and engaging prose, Michael Tonry surveys what is known about the deterrent, incapacitative, and rehabilitative effects of punishment, and explains what needs to be done to move from an ignoble present to a better future.

When women won the vote in the United States in 1920 they were still routinely barred from serving as jurors, but some began vigorous campaigns for a place in the jury box. This book tells the story of how women mobilized in fifteen states to change jury laws so that women could gain this additional right of citizenship. Some campaigns quickly succeeded; others took substantially longer. The book reveals that when women strategically adapted their tactics to the broader political environment, they were able to speed up the pace of jury reform, while less strategic movements took longer. A comparison of the more strategic women's jury movements with those that were less strategic shows that the former built coalitions with other women's groups, took advantage of political opportunities, had past experience in seeking legal reforms and confronted tensions and even conflict within their ranks in ways that bolstered their action.

'Reforming Justice' calls for justice to be repositioned more centrally in evolving notions of equitable development. Justice is fundamental to human well being and essential to development. Over the past fifty years, however, overseas development assistance - foreign aid - has grappled with the challenge of improving 'the rule of law' with underwhelming and often dismal results around the world. Development agencies have supported legal and judicial reforms in order to improve economic growth and good governance, but are yet to address mounting concerns about equity and distribution. Building on new evidence from Asia, Livingston Armytage argues that it is now time to realign the approach to promote justice as fairness and equity.

The United States government, represented by the Office of the Solicitor General, appears before the Supreme Court more than any other litigant. The Office's link to the president, the arguments it makes before the Court, and its ability to alter the legal and policy landscape make it the most important Supreme Court litigant bar none. As such, scholars must understand the Office's role in Supreme Court decision making and, more importantly, its ability to influence the Court. This book examines whether and how the Office of the Solicitor General influences the United States Supreme Court. Combining archival data with recent innovations in the areas of matching and causal inference, the book finds that the Solicitor General influences every aspect of the Court's decision making process. From granting review to cases, selecting winning parties, writing opinions, and interpreting precedent, the Solicitor General's office influences the Court to behave in ways it otherwise would not.

Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment.

In this thoroughly informed account of the magistracy the author deals with key issues touching on that institution. Focussing on what Lord Bingham, Lord Chief Justice, described as a 'democratic jewel beyond price', he explains its rationale, goals and over-riding values. Dealing with major developments, economics, management, day-to-day practicalities and changing times the author casts an experienced eye over summary justice, law and order and its fascinating history of local administration. Describing the magistracy as a great national institution, independent, respected and a true people's court, John Hosking nevertheless decries a halving of its size, closure of courthouses, remote services and increasing reliance on professional judges rather than community volunteers. Though much has changed for the better to increase competency, meet criticism and maintain integrity, the book explains how other developments have challenged the very status of the lay magistracy and made inroads into one of the most cherished principles of our democracy: public participation in the justice system.