The Logic of Time in Law and Legal Expert Systems*

Abstract. Research on an expert system regarding unemployment insurance law has pointed to the difficulties of explicitly representing temporal relations. The question has been addressed in the artificial intelligence literature with respect to planning systems and linguistic analysis. The approaches adopted do not appear to be directly transposable to legal discourse. The problem seems so far to have escaped notice amongst researchers attempting to develop legal expert systems. The paper explores in a preliminary way how lawyers use temporal concepts. It is submitted that “legal time” only partly overlaps with real time. A sketch of a formalization of temporal relations in law, following J. F. Allen's approach, is presented.     

A Neo‐Institutional Account of Prison Diffusion

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's “birth” in Jacksonian‐Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo‐institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field‐level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto‐prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudoprofessional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.     

Regulatory Pragmatism,Legal Knowledge and Compliance with Law in Areas of State Weakness

The literature suggests that compliance with law is unlikely in areas of state weakness absent additional state capacity. Utilizing three novel data sets collected in adjacent districts in India and Nepal, this article demonstrates that weak states can significantly increase compliance by fostering accurate legal knowledge—something the literature often assumes is widespread. This assumption is problematic because principal–agent problems prevent many weak states from behaving consistently; target populations often lack education and competent legal advice and struggle to learn about the law via observation. States that employ regulatory pragmatism, however, may overcome this challenge; they do so by designing implementation strategies for on‐the‐ground realities. I investigate two such efforts—delegated enforcement and information dissemination through local leaders. The data indicate that strategies consistent with regulatory pragmatism, in contrast to those that are legally doctrinaire or deterrence based significantly increase legal knowledge and compliance, even where the state is locally weak.     

法律实用主义方法视角下的检察工作科学发展

科学发展是检察工作践行科学发展观、实现法律监督职能的体现。作为一种司法哲学,法律实用主义推崇行动的价值、强调实际工作成效,主张能动的司法行为,关注社会的最终目的性需求,其合理内核为探究检察工作科学发展提供了方法视角。借鉴法律实用主义的方法去审视检察工作的现状与未来,认识检察工作科学发展的内涵与衡量标准,排除阻碍检察工作科学发展的障碍因素,践行于具体的检察行动,才能取得检察工作的实际成效、实现科学发展。     

The Legal Case File as Border Object: On Self‐reference and Other‐reference in Criminal Law

What do case files do? With help of an ethnographic study on the care, maintenance, and use of legal case files in a Dutch, inquisitorial context, we work through Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law. We understand these case files as enacting and performing both self‐reference and other‐reference. We coin the term border object to denote the way the legal case file becomes the nexus between two worlds it itself performatively produces: the world of ‘law itself’ on the one hand, and the ‘world out there’ on the other. As such, our discussion offers clues for a partial reconciliation of Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law: while Luhmann's insistence on other‐referential operations assist in showing how law forges an ‘epistemic relationship’ with the realities it seeks to judge, Latour's concentration on the materialities of epistemic practices assists in situating these other‐referential and self‐referential operations.     

The ‘Criminalization’ of Social Security Law: Towards a Punitive Welfare State?

The aim of this article is to place certain recent legislative reforms in the field of social security within the context of the overall development of the welfare state, and examine to what extent a certain trend is discernable: namely, whether eligibility for various welfare benefits is becoming so contingent on socially acceptable behaviour as to make the welfare system less a means for the relief of poverty, its ostensible sole purpose, and more akin to an instrument of education, even punishment, for those who have recourse to social security benefits.     

新实用主义与晚近破产冲突法的发展

在涉外破产问题上,晚近以欧盟《关于破产程序条例》和联合国《跨国界破产示范法》为代表,在破产的域外效力上体现出一种新实用主义的理念,即主张在主要利益中心开始的主要破产程序具有普及性效力,而在营业所等地所开始的附属破产程序效力只能及于本国领域的资产,同时强调了主要程序与附属程序之间的协调与合作。新实用主义促进了破产冲突法的发展,对我国的相关立法与司法具有借鉴价值。     

The Constitution of Violence Through the Language of Law: Legal Hermenutics in Second‐Century Roman Egypt

Bryen, Ari Z. 2013. Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation . Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 376. $75.00 cloth; $75.00 eBook. This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, calling on legal authorities to interpret claims of iniuria, or legal battery, into a language that they understand and remedy. In doing so, law changes the discourse of violence, specifically, and social life, more broadly.     

我国的公司证券法律制度少了一个灵魂

我国的公司法和证券法都很落后,制度建设迷雾重重。如何从纷繁复杂的局面中找出主要矛盾,是我国公司证券法学界面临的一大难题。本文通过对法律制度的经济哲学分析找到了这个主要矛盾:缺乏灵魂——市场经济的哲学指导思想,具体表现为法院关门。本文用简洁明快的语言展现出一个清晰的逻辑:法院关门扼杀了制衡造假的基本市场力量——投资者诉讼;解决问题的途径是法院开门,不折不扣地受理公司法和证券法规定的各类民事案件;而发生错误的根本原因不光在法院,还在全国法律界对市场经济的认识不深,法律人知识面偏狭,知识结构单一。     

Ninhydrin Thiohemiketals: Basic Research Towards Improved Fingermark Detection Techniques Employing Nano‐Technology*

Abstract: In the first part of a comprehensive research project towards more efficient application of nano‐technology to fingerprint visualization, we investigated the possibility of more selective binding of gold nanoparticles (NP) to fingerprint material. We synthesized derivatives of ninhydrin and 1,2‐indanedione containing loosely bound thiol groups. In particular: thiohemiketals (THK) of ninhydrin, and thioketals of 1,2‐indanedione were prepared and tested as potential fingerprint reagents. By reacting ninhydrin with various thiols we were able to produce a series of novel THK, bearing the SR group always at C2. Ninhydrin THK reacted with amino acids to produce the expected Ruhemann’s purple, and they also developed latent fingermarks on paper in a similar manner to ninhydrin. Ketals and thioketals derived from 1,2‐indanedione reacted neither with amino acids nor with latent fingermarks. In the second part of the research, the thiols which are formed on the ridges as byproducts of the reaction with amino acids will be tested for their potential as stabilizers for gold NP that will become covalently bound to the fingerprint ridges.     

One Myth of the Classical Natural Law Theory: Reflecting on the “Thin” View of Legal Positivism

Much controversy has emerged on the demarcation between legal positivism and non‐legal positivism with some authors calling for a ban on the ‐as they see it‐ nonsensical labelling of legal philosophical debates. We agree with these critics; simplistic labelling cannot replace the work of sophisticated and sound argumentation. In this paper we do not use the term ‘legal positivism’ as a simplistic label but identify a specific position which we consider to be the most appealing and plausible view on legal positivism. This is the view advocated by Gardner in his paper 'Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths’ (Gardner 2001 , 199), where he carefully scrutinises the most convincing and unifying postulates of legal positivism, which he calls “the thin view”. The study shows that this thin view presupposes an empirical conception of action that is untenable and implausible since it makes acts of engagement with the law unintelligible to an observer of such acts.     

Towards a European Law of Contracts

Abstract: European contract law has recently been the subject of increasing attention and intense debate. In addressing this issue, the following contribution departs from traditional analyses of the necessity, feasibility, and opportunity to harmonise national legislation on contractual relations. Instead, the author seeks to demonstrate that, with the objective of promoting the internal market and developing trade within it, EC authorities have long since given birth to a genuine European contract law. Beginning with the analysis of a body of EC directives, this article argues that the genuine nature of this law can be ascertained despite its limits or rather by taking these limits into account. The important rights granted to different contracting parties (consumer‐purchaser, consumer‐tourist, and certain professionals) stand in contrast to the formal incoherence and fragmented character of the legal texts. The article concludes that, in analysing the notion of European contact law, it is necessary to adapt a functional approach rather than a formal one, because the functional approach has dominated European integration and the European law of contracts since its inception.