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Years before Hitler unleashed the “Final Solution” to annihilate European Jews, he began a lesser-known campaign to eradicate the mentally ill, which facilitated the gassing and lethal injection of as many as 270,000 people and set a precedent for the mass murder of civilians. In Confronting the “Good Death” Michael Bryant analyzes the U.S. government and West German judiciary’s attempt to punish the euthanasia killers after the war. The first author to address the impact of geopolitics on the courts’ representation of Nazi euthanasia, Bryant argues that international power relationships wreaked havoc on the prosecutions. Drawing on primary sources, this provocative investigation of the Nazi campaign against the mentally ill and the postwar quest for justice will interest general readers and provide critical information for scholars of Holocaust studies, legal history, and human rights. Support for this publication was generously provided by the Eugene M. Kayden Fund at the University of Colorado.
These investigations illuminate the entangled experiences of Jews who sought to balance the pull of communal, religious, and linguistic traditions with the demands and allure of full participation in European life.
The introduction of state planning and party dictatorship dramatically altered the environment for social theory in the German Democratic Republic. But social thought did not disappear. By the mid-1950s, East German social theorists discovered the basic contradictions of state socialism that would eventually lead to its collapse: the inability of the plan to function without markets and its inability to permit markets; the inability of the party-state to guarantee the rule of law and yet also the need for a regular system of rules in a modern industrial society; and the contradictory philosophical claims of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy that rejected idealism, and Marxist-Leninist dogma with its idealistic claim to know the laws of social modernization. Making use of archival sources, Caldwell examines the articulation of these analyses, their subsequent suppression by party authorities in the late 1950s, and their return under the guise of cybernetics in the 1960s.
HauptbeschreibungThe International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda hold far-reaching sentencing powers. At the same time, consistency and fairness in sentencing are of utmost important to the practice of the Tribunals. Accordingly, the sentencing powers of the Tribunals demand for a system of control. One crucial procedural safeguard to facilitate such control is the scrutiny exercised by the Appeals Chamber. This study analyses both sentencing and appellate law in the International Tribunals. Its fundamental objective is to ensure consistency in punishment by means of appellate review.The study analyses the substantive guidelines for the sentencing decision and describes how these have evolved in the practice of the Tribunals. It then explores the nature and scope of the appeal. In doing so it examines the most important procedural devices and instruments and assesses their practical importance to the appellate process. Finally, it analyses the importance the respective practice of the Tribunals will hold for the future practice of the International Criminal Court.
Criminal punishment in America is harsh and degrading--more so than anywhere else in the liberal west. Executions and long prison terms are commonplace in America. Countries like France and Germany, by contrast, are systematically mild. European offenders are rarely sent to prison, and when they are, they serve far shorter terms than their American counterparts. Why is America so comparatively harsh? In this novel work of comparative legal history, James Whitman argues that the answer lies in America's triumphant embrace of a non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power which have contributed to a law of punishment that is more willing to degrade offenders.
While we often tend to think of the Third Reich as a zone of lawlessness, the Nazi dictatorship and its policies of persecution rested on a legal foundation set in place and maintained by judges, lawyers, and civil servants trained in the law. This volume offers a concise and compelling account of how these intelligent and welleducated legal professionals lent their skills and knowledge to a system of oppression and domination. The chapters address why German lawyers and jurists were attracted to Nazism; how their support of the regime resulted from a combination of ideological conviction, careerist opportunism, and legalistic selfdelusion; and whether they were held accountable for their Nazi-era actions after 1945. This book also examines the experiences of Jewish lawyers who fell victim to anti-Semitic measures. The volume will appeal to scholars, students, and other readers with an interest in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the history of jurisprudence.
Early Modern Debts: 1550–1700 makes an important contribution to the history of debt and credit in Europe, creating new transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on problems of debt, credit, trust, interest, and investment in early modern societies. The collection includes essays by leading international scholars and early career researchers in the fields of economic and social history, legal history, literary criticism, and philosophy on such subjects as trust and belief; risk; institutional history; colonialism; personhood; interiority; rhetorical invention; amicable language; ethnicity and credit; household economics; service; and the history of comedy. Across the collection, the book reveals debt’s ubiquity in life and literature. It considers debt’s function as a tie between the individual and the larger group and the ways in which debts structured the home, urban life, legal systems, and linguistic and literary forms.
Increasingly, international governmental networks and organisations make it necessary to master the legal principles of other jurisdictions. Since the advent of international criminal tribunals this need has fully reached criminal law. A large part of their work is based on comparative research. The legal systems which contribute most to this systemic discussion are common law and civil law, sometimes called continental law. So far this dialogue appears to have been dominated by the former. While there are many reasons for this, one stands out very clearly: Language. English has become the lingua franca of international legal research. The present book addresses this issue. Thomas Vormbaum is one of the foremost German legal historians and the book's original has become a cornerstone of research into the history of German criminal law beyond doctrinal expositions; it allows a look at the system’s genesis, its ideological, political and cultural roots. In the field of comparative research, it is of the utmost importance to have an understanding of the law’s provenance, in other words its historical DNA.
Plea bargaining is one of the most important and most discussed issues in modern criminal procedure law. Based on historical and comparative legal research, the author has analysed the wide-spread use of plea bargaining in different criminal justice systems. The book sets out in-depth studies of consensual case dispositions in the UK, examining how plea bargaining has developed and spread in England and Wales. It also goes on to discusses in detail the problems that this practise poses for the rule of law by avoiding procedural safe-guards. The book draws on empirical research in its examination of the absence of informal settlements in the former GDR, offering a unique insight into criminal...