Patrilines,surnames, and family identity:

The Imperial decrees emancipating the serfs of the Russian Baltic provinces (1816–1820) included the requirement that serfs, who would now become free peasants and obtain legal standing, have both a first name and a surname, the latter of their own choosing. The article examines the process through which Baltic peasants obtained surnames and analyzes the choices they made. In the Pinkenhof estate, in the province of Livland, emancipated serfs most often chose surnames that reflected their place of residence, but also frequently chose names from the natural world, occupations, and other similar sources. The acquisition of surnames helped to consolidate family and lineage identity, which had been difficult in the pre-emancipation perion when individuals bore only a first name plus the name of the place in which they were currently residing, the latter changing as they moved.     

Luhmann: Law,Justice, and Time

Time is central to Luhmann’s writings on social systems. Social systems, as systems of meaning, operate within three dimensions: factual, social and temporal. Each of these dimensions entails selections of actualities from potentialities (or contingencies) within horizons. Whilst the factual dimension involves selections based on distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘something else’, and the social distinguishes between alter and ego (asking with respect to any meaning whether another experiences it as I do), the temporal dimension operates with the primary distinction of before and after. In the temporal dimension, everything is ‘ordered only according to the when and not to the who/what/where/how of experience and action’ (Luhmann in Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p. 78). In this paper, we explore the connection between the temporal dimension of meaning within the legal system and its connection to justice. We begin by setting out succinctly the role played by justice within the legal system, as presented by Luhmann, particularly in his book Law as a social system (2004). From this beginning, we move on to consider the relationship between law, justice and time, taking two examples. The first is the temporality of judicial decisions. The second concerns the relationship between the temporal meaning of law’s own operations, and the presumption of innocence.     

Restitution, Rectification, and Mitigation: Negligent Solicitors and Wills, Again

A solicitor, when drafting a will, can owe a duty of care in tort to the intended beneficiary of a bequest under that will. The Court of Appeal has recently confirmed that where a solicitor has misdrafted the will, the intended beneficiary can sometimes rectify it, and recover the intended gift. The pattern of this rectification is restitutionary, raising the question analysed in this article of whether an intended beneficiary can have a direct personal action in restitution to reverse the unjust enrichment of an unintended recipient. It seems that, though fraught, such an action may indeed in principle lie.     

Chapter 3: Pleadings,Notice, Parties,and Appearances

This chapter focuses on UCCJA s? 9 pleading requirements. Judges need the information this section requires litigants to provide in order to determine jurisdiction. This chapter also covers who is entitled to notice and opportunity to be heard, how notice may be given, and what the court can do to facilitate appearances of out-of-state parties and children.     

Inmate homicides: Killers, victims, motives, and circumstances

Despite popular media depictions, prison homicides are quite infrequent, averaging only four per one hundred thousand inmates annually in U.S. prisons during the current decade and declining over 90 percent in the past thirty years. Only a handful of studies had examined this most serious form of institutional violence. This study examined thirty-five inmate homicides, involving fifty-two perpetrators, occurring in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for 2000-2008. The majority of homicides occurred in inmates’ cells, involved a single assailant, resulted from beatings, or was cross-racial. Often multiple motivations for the homicides were present. Hispanic inmates were overrepresented as perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators and victims were overwhelmingly male, and likely to have records of violent arrests and problematic prison adjustments. A substantial proportion of both perpetrators and victims had suspected or confirmed gang affiliations. Perpetrators were differentiated from victims by younger age, higher IQ scores, greater educational attainment, and sentences for armed robbery.     

Detecting deception: Practice, practitioners, and theory

Conclusions Of the forty-six types of detectives studied, all but one used the same general procedures to detect deception. (The exception was the adversarial method used by trial lawyers working in the American judicial system.) All others used standard logical systems (both deductive and inductive) in combination with intuitive methods. The more successful detections seemed to be closely associated with intuitive methods, particularly so-called “indirect thinking”. Authors'Note: The “I” in this chapter refers to the principal author, Bart Whaley. Since it was first written in 1999, Whaley has increased the number of types of detectives studies to over 100, and the number of major works cited to over 500. The most important finding was to reinforce the recommendation that effective detection and deception is crucially dependent on large and accurate data bases based on systematically collected and analyzed case studies.     

American penology: Words, deeds, and consequences

A primary argument underlying this paper is that it is possible to capture a particular theory or conceptual rationale in the development of a penal program strategy. Further, it is possible to implement the program in a way that corresponds to both the program strategy and theory and then to evaluate the program to determine the adequacy of both the program strategy and the theory upon which it is based. The history of U.S. penal reform does not illustrate this potential, however. Rather, U.S. penal reforms have been implemented without evaluation and have resulted in a pattern of unintended consequences, most notably increased social control and an associated undermining of democratic rights and individual freedoms, without any corresponding decline in crime. These trends and outcomes are documented in order to draw penal program and evaluation policy implications for the U.S. and their ever expanding penal complex and the Czech Republic in their ongoing efforts to implement a penal system consistent with their newly emerging democratic society. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Law and crisis: Conjunctions,correlations, critiques

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