Around 1250, a shift began to occur in texts written on the common law. Where earlier texts on the practices of the king’s courts had mostly been written in Latin, a number of the new texts written after 1250 were written in French. The shift to French initially occurred mostly in the context of texts on counting and pleading, the oral parts of court procedure, which were conducted in French, and one author of the 1280s even suggested that by his time a norm had developed that texts on counting and pleading should be written in French. This article examines the evidence for such a norm and the reasons for the shift to French in the later thirteenth century. It uses texts on counting and pleading to examine how both French and Latin were used in the education of pleaders and concludes that, although a norm probably did exist that the oral parts of procedure should be taught in French, Latin was still being used for a number of different purposes in the education of pleaders.
Charitable Trusts of Cemeteries and Places of Worship in Thailand: A Historical Anomaly (Surutchada Reekie) (DOI 10.1093/ajlh/njac022)
Abstract:
This article examines Thailand’s historic charitable trusts for the purpose of establishing and maintaining cemeteries and places of worship. Whilst existing literature explores the reception of English trusts law in British colonial territories in Southeast Asia over the course of nineteenth century, little is discussed in relation to Thailand, historically known as Siam, during the same period. Based on the author’s archival research, this article explores the route and development of these trusts and argues that, due to the Thai Supreme Court’s recognition of their charitable purpose, these trusts are not subject to a rule against perpetuities. Therefore, they will continue to present an anomalous exception to Thailand’s civil law legal framework and offer a fascinating example of the deep, tenacious roots put down by a rejected legal concept from Thailand’s brush with nineteenth century colonial powers.
The Tragic Pragmatism of the Wagner Act (Daniel Judt) (DOI 10.1093/ajlh/njac019)
Abstract:
The Wagner Act established a right to collective action as the keystone of industrial democracy. In doing so, it also articulated a radical conception of the self: that individuals form genuine desires and attain full self-actualization through collective action. This conception ran counter to the traditional liberal idea of selfhood, which took possessive individualism as the fundament of democratic governance. This paper places the Wagner Act and its reception in the context of changing conceptions of the self in American political thought from 1920 to 1950. The Wagner Act derived its conception of democratic activity from a pragmatist and progressivist theory of the “social self.” But its reception took place amidst a very different intellectual context. By midcentury, a liberal hostility to “mass society” and its deleterious effects on individual choice had repudiated the older pragmatist collectivism. In other words, the Act’s core provision—the notion of collective action as central to the formation of workers’ individual desires—was born of a dying moment in American thought. The immediate hostility that the new labor law regime faced in Congress and the courts was a consequence, in part, of that disjuncture.
O’Connor v Donaldson (1975): Legal Challenges, Psychiatric Authority, and the Dangerousness Problem in Deinstitutionalization (Laura Hirshbein) (DOI 10.1093/ajlh/njad002)
Abstract:
In 1975, the Supreme Court heard the case of O’Connor v Donaldson, in which Kenneth Donaldson disputed the decision of his psychiatrists at the Florida State Hospital to keep him incarcerated for 15 years for a mental illness, though he was not dangerous or receiving treatment. The Donaldson decision pitted activist attorneys against psychiatrists who were increasingly beleaguered in their efforts to assert expertise about mental illness in American society. This case and its context offer a window into the psychiatric and legal conversations within the deinstitutionalization movement. During a time when both psychiatry and the law were shifting in their professional claims and emphases, each side was captured by an idea of reform based on how they imagined the problems to be configured. Examining themes of place, authority, right to treatment, and dangerousness reveals the limitations of the reforms and the hardening of a narrative that limited state action to the elision of mental illness with dangerousness.
Book reviews:
- Kristin A. Olbertson, The Dreadful Word: Speech Crime and Polite Gentlemen in Massachusetts (Jessica Lowe)
- Mary Sarah Bilder, Female Genius: Eliza Harriot and George Washington at the Dawn of the Constitution (Rosemarie Zagarri)
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