The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.
Downloaded 1st 10 pgs Ch 1 via Air
1. The ecclesiastical courts: structures and procedures
2. The business of the courts, 1500–1640
3. Tithe causes
4. Wills and testamentary causes
5. Defamation
6. Matrimonial litigation and marriage licenses
7. Office causes
8. The roots of expansion and critical voices
9. Charting decline, 1640–1830
10. Explaining decline
11. The Bills of 1733–1734
12. Snips and repairs: small steps to reform, 1753–1813
13. Royal commissions and early fruits, 1815–1832
14. Reform frustrated
15. Reforms thick and fast, 1854–1860.

Another New Nietzsche
Reviewed Work: Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy by Bernard Williams
Review by: Barry Allen
History and Theory
Vol. 42, No. 3 (Oct., 2003), pp. 363-377
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My aim in this Article is to focus on the history of thinking about law in the context of 3 topics (..) to show that the continuous development of the theory of legal positivism, however useful it may have been or may still be, has possibly caused us to ignore other aspects of what was originally part of the positivist picture. (..)The first of these dimensions is the relationship between legal theory and legal reform. (..) that an account of the nature of law might be developed not simply as an aid to understanding or accurate description, but instead as a way of facilitating reform of law itself or reform of how a society understands the idea of law. Second, legal positivism, at the time of its late 19thC (or perhaps even earlier) origins, was focused on the importance of coercion, force, and sanctions as central components of law. But as with the creation of legal theories for the purpose of legal reform, this emphasis on the coercive side of law has also been banished to a kind of jurisprudential purgatory, for reasons and with consequences that deserve further examination. The third lost element of earlier versions of legal positivism is its focus on judicial decision making and the role of judges. Modern legal positivists, for whom 1961 is all too often the beginning of useful thought about the nature of law, do not, with few exceptions, consider theories of judicial decision making to be a necessary or even important part of the positivist perspective. But it was not always so. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Hobbes’s account of law, like his account of punishment, does not fit well into our existing scholarly categories. (..). He was neither a legal positivist nor a natural law theorist, at least not as we usually use these labels. He adopted neither a retributive nor a consequentialist justification of punishment. Yet his account of human interaction, particularly with respect to law and punishment, captures actual experience better than the more familiar alternatives. Moreover, the space for subversion in Hobbes’s theory may make his account more normatively appealing than it has seemed to modern liberals. (...) 3 questions about Hobbesian theory: What is law? What is its relationship to punishment? And what are the implications of Hobbes’s theory for contemporary efforts to describe law or the relationship of law to punishment? The first (..) Hobbes’s legal theory is still so widely mischaracterized, sometimes even by Hobbes scholars, that it is worth returning to his claims. The second question has received much less attention, perhaps because a right to resist punishment seems so discordant with the authoritarian Hobbes we know, or think we know. And the third question has received still less attention, for contemporary jurisprudence scholarship rarely cites anyone who wrote before Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. I hope to show that, in many instances, Hobbes has been misread; even more importantly, I hope to persuade scholars of jurisprudence that what Hobbes actually said is worthy of their engagement. -- downloaded pdf to Note

She is correct in rejecting the assimilation of Hobbes’s legal theory to Austin’s, and in noting the strands of Hobbes’s view that disqualify him from counting as any sort of legal positivist. And I agree, on the whole, with her characterization of Hobbes’s account of justified punishment, and that this account has its attractions yet produces some puzzles which Hobbes does not fully resolve. My disagreements are with her second-order characterization of Hobbes’s legal theory. I want to discuss two related areas of disagreement. The first disagreement concerns whether we should assess Hobbes’s account of law in terms of the standards of general descriptive jurisprudence: Ristroph denies that it should be; I disagree. The second concerns whether we should take Hobbes’s treatment of the political as explanatorily prior to the legal to show that Hobbes was in some way apart from the natural law tradition in jurisprudence: Ristroph affirms this; I disagree. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 240 -- This Article offers a new way to understand the enforcement of domestic and international law that we call “outcasting.” Unlike the distinctive method that modern states use to enforce their law, outcasting is nonviolent: it does not rely on bureaucratic organizations, such as police or militia, that employ physical force to maintain order. Instead, outcasting involves denying the disobedient the benefits of social cooperation and membership. Law enforcement through outcasting in domestic law can be found throughout history - from medieval Iceland and classic canon law to modern-day public law. And it is ubiquitous in modern international law, from the World Trade Organization to the Universal Postal Union to the Montreal Protocol. Across radically different subject areas, international legal institutions use others (usually states) to enforce their rules and typically deploy outcasting rather than physical force. Seeing outcasting as a form of law enforcement not only helps us recognize that the traditional critique of international law - that it is not enforced and is therefore both ineffective and not real law - is based on a limited and inaccurate understanding of law enforcement. It also allows us to understand more fully when and how international law matters. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 98 -- Keywords: international law, treaties, World Trade Organization, Enforcement, jurisprudence

In "The Concept of Law," Hart showed that sanction-centered accounts of every stripe ignored an essential feature of law. This feature he termed the internal point of view. Seen from the internal point of view, the law is not simply sanction-threatening, directing, or predicting, but rather obligation-imposing. Though the internal point of view is perhaps Hart's greatest contribution to jurisprudential theory, this concept is also often and easily misunderstood. This is unfortunate, not only because these misreadings distort Hart's theory, but, more importantly, because they prevent us from appreciating the true infirmities of sanction-centered theories and the compelling reasons why they ought to be rejected. -- The internal point of view is the practical attitude of rule-acceptance - it does not imply that people who accept the rules accept their moral legitimacy, only that they are disposed to guide and evaluate conduct in accordance with the rules. The internal point of view plays four roles in Hart's theory: (1) it specifies a particular type of motivation that someone may take towards to the law; (2) it constitutes one of the main existence conditions for social and legal rules; (3) it accounts for the intelligibility of legal practice and discourse; (4) it provides a naturalistically acceptable semantics for legal statements. Finally, sanction-centered theories are unacceptable for three reasons: (1) they are myopic in that they ignore one of the motivations that people might have for obeying the law; (2) they are unable to account for the existence of legal systems; (3) they cannot account for the intelligibility of legal practice and discourse. --

Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD -- This research demonstrates wide variation in tightness–looseness (the strength of punishment and degree of latitude/permissiveness) at the state level in the United States, as well as its association with a variety of ecological and historical factors, psychological characteristics, and state-level outcomes. Consistent with theory and past research, ecological and man-made threats—such as a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater disease prevalence, fewer natural resources, and greater degree of external threat—predicted increased tightness at the state level. Tightness is also associated with higher trait conscientiousness and lower trait openness, as well as a wide array of outcomes at the state level. Compared with loose states, tight states have higher levels of social stability, including lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization. However, tight states also have higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness relative to loose states. In all, tightness–looseness provides a parsimonious explanation of the wide variation we see across the 50 states of the United States of America. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. By the Marquis Beccaria of Milan. With a Commentary by M. de Voltaire. A New Edition Corrected. (Albany: W.C. Little & Co., 1872). 07/11/2014. <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2193> -- An extremely influential Enlightenment treatise on legal reform in which Beccaria advocates the ending of torture and the death penalty. The book also contains a lengthy commentary by Voltaire which is an indication of high highly French enlightened thinkers regarded the work.