Introduction (Jean-Louis Halpérin & Amalia D. Kessler)
DOI 10.4000/13wwa
Quelle connaissance et quel impact du droit criminel américain dans la France du xixe siècle ? (Jean-Louis Halpérin)
DOI 10.4000/13wwb
Abstract:
At two moments during the 19th century, French jurists were interested in American criminal law, and not only in the overseas prison systems discussed in the 1833 report by de Beaumont and Tocqueville. The first moment occurred between 1825 and 1835, when Livingston’s draft of a penal code for Louisiana was published in French, and when Livingston came to France. This project, which provided for the abolition of the death penalty, was seen as a response to the risks of increased repression by ultra-royalists on the basis of the Napoleonic Penal Code. The second moment occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when American innovations in indeterminate sentencing and juvenile courts were discussed in France. After identifying and analyzing the texts of French jurists who dealt with American criminal law in these two periods, the article examines the estrangement of French specialists of criminal law from American ideas.
Atlantic Knowledge Transfer. U.S. Criminal Law in 19th Century Germany (Sylvia Kesper-Biermann)
DOI 10.4000/13wwd
Abstract:
The article examines the transfer of legal ideas from the U.S.A. to Germany in the long 19th century. On the one hand, actors and paths of knowledge transfer are described. On the other hand, selected examples are used to examine which North American ideas, texts, and experiences were perceived and discussed in Germany. It is shown that two phases with different emphases of reception must be distinguished, namely a first phase from the 1830s to the 1850s and a second phase around the turn of the 20th century.
French and American Histories of Animal Prosecutions: Criminal Punishment and Animal Rights through the Prism of the Past (Amalia D. Kessler)
DOI
Abstract:
Between the early 1800s and the early 1900s, a sudden, and as yet unexplained, transatlantic literature on the history of animal prosecutions emerged. Focusing on France and the United States, this article explores the birth and evolution of this literature. A product of such developments as the rise of historicism, positivist criminology, and a social movement against animal cruelty, this literature addresses what proved to be enduring challenges of criminal punishment and animal rights. In so doing, it highlights the interrelation of these seemingly distinct domains.
Criminal Justice in Italy between the End of the Liberal State and Fascism: Transnational Perspectives between the USA and Italy (1919-1945) (Luigi Lacchè)
DOI 10.4000/13wwe
Abstract:
This article considers how American scholars and articles published in English viewed the Italian reforms of Criminal Justice implemented between the “Ferri project” (1919) and the Fascist regime. It analyzes in particular how Fascist criminal reforms have been received, interpreted and assessed from that perspective. To summarize the views of American legal thinkers on Fascist criminal reforms we can say that, despite the popularity of positivism in the U.S. at the turn of the century, the radical Ferri Code was criticized in several respects. By the mid-1930s American responses were still focused on questions of criminal science, rather than the nature of the regime itself. The isolationist policy of the U.S. did not prevent a number of scholars from assessing certain aspects of Fascist codes and criminal reforms, pointing out problems and contradictions. The transnational viewpoint is therefore important to understand better the real nature of the Fascist regime and the formal maintenance of the principle of legality.
Why and How Sexual Freedom Changed Western Criminal Law (19th and 20th centuries) (Aniceto Masferrer)
DOI 10.4000/13wwf
Abstract:
This article explains “why” and “how” the new paradigm of sexual freedom radically changed Western criminal law. “Why” touches upon the change in the moral sexual paradigm in the West at the cultural level. “How” describes the ways in which sexual (criminal) laws were reformed in accordance with the new cultural paradigm, describing the mutual influences between the US and Europe: while the US Supreme Court took the lead in forbidding states to make laws that might interfere in the sexual behaviour by resorting to the right to privacy – and this legal doctrine notably influenced most of European jurisdictions –, in Europe legal scholars and legislatures were the protagonists in undertaking criminal law reform, adjusting sexual criminal law to the new cultural ideas.
Varia
The doctrine in power and the origins of the doctrine dirigée: the early role of the Soviet legal doctrine through the official legal journal of the RSFSR (1918-1922) (Marco Mellina)
DOI
Abstract:
Analysing data about articles and authors from the official legal journal of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Proletarian Revolution and Law, this article shows that the legal doctrine writing in the journal was primarily composed by jurists who were also part of the ruling class from 1918 to 1921, effectively creating a doctrine in power. This observation partly contrasts with the dominant Western historiographical notion of Soviet legal doctrine being only directed by an external political power. However, the article also shows how, with the advent of the NEP, the establishment of the USSR, the revival of law and the consequent proliferation of legal journals, Soviet legal doctrine expanded and laid the foundations for the doctrine dirigée of later years.
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