King Charls His Case: The Intended Prosecution of Charles I

Charles I was put to death without having pleaded to the charges preferred against him during his trial. This article examines the case that his prosecutor later said he would have opened, had the king entered a plea. John Cook's case was predictably forthright in its denunciation of the accused. On the other hand, it has some highly significant omissions; some of it was legally and factually hopeless, and much of the rest invited fairly obvious responses; whilst its exposition was much more contentious than one might expect from a case for the prosecution of a man whose guilt had already been pronounced ‘notorious’. Rather than simply setting out a wholly unsatisfactory indictment of the king's alleged ‘guilt’, as a mere prelude to the shedding of his blood, Cook's true aim appears to have been to goad the king into making, before the eyes of the watching world, a case in his own defence sufficient to enable the king's judges, having heard what he might have to say, and subject to ‘the merit of the Cause’, to hand down some sentence other than death - all as the Act erecting the high court of justice authorized them to do.     

Patent Cases in the Court of Chancery, 1714–58

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it discusses recent improvements in the cataloguing of Chancery bills and pleadings entered between 1714 and 1758, held in the C 11 series at the National Archives. This has made it much easier to locate cases by subject, and a methodology for doing this is described. Secondly, the article outlines the results of work carried out in C 11 on cases relating to patents for invention. Although there has been significant research into how other forms of intellectual property right were adjudicated in the Court of Chancery, notably copyright, patent law for this period remains obscure. The article shows that Chancery (along with the common law courts) retained the principal jurisdiction in patent law, rather than the Privy Council as was once thought.     

Contrast Enhancement of Bite Mark Images Using the Grayscale Mixer in ACR in Photoshop®

Enhanced images may improve bite mark edge definition, assisting forensic analysis. Current contrast enhancement involves color extraction, viewing layered images by channel. A novel technique, producing a single enhanced image using the grayscale mix panel within Adobe Camera Raw^®, has been developed and assessed here, allowing adjustments of multiple color channels simultaneously. Stage 1 measured RGB values in 72 versions of a color chart image; eight sliders in Photoshop^® were adjusted at 25% intervals, all corresponding colors affected. Stage 2 used a bite mark image, and found only red, orange, and yellow sliders had discernable effects. Stage 3 assessed modality preference between color, grayscale, and enhanced images; on average, the 22 survey participants chose the enhanced image as better defined for nine out of 10 bite marks. The study has shown potential benefits for this new technique. However, further research is needed before use in the analysis of bite marks.     

Rumble in Paradise: The Caribbean Court of Justice Creating Waves in International Law after British Caribbean Bank v Belize

On 25 June 2013, the Caribbean Court of Justice denied a motion to halt the proceedings of an international arbitration between British Caribbean Bank (BCB) and the Government of Belize, and instead granted BCB the right to continue with the arbitration proceedings. The ruling is particularly important as it sheds light on the anti-arbitration principle – a feature known mostly to Common law – and the still troubled area of expropriation in relation to bilateral investment treaties. In this case comment, I will provide an overview of those main points and assess what implications there are under international law. Specifically, this comment also develops a notion of financial property, and asses under what circumstances financial property can be expropriated in light of bilateral investment treaties. The focus on financial property is to both generate a discussion and also raise more questions on problematic clauses in investment treaties.     

The Strategic Timing behind Position-taking in the US Congress: A Study of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act

Roll call voting by members of the US Congress has been frequently studied. In contrast, the various decisions leading up to roll call voting are relatively unexplored. This article analyses one of those decisions: when senators announce their final passage vote intention. The authors use the same set of variables to analyse both the timing of the announcement and the final passage vote. They find that different independent variables predict these two different decisions, though the constituency and the senator's institutional setting matter in both. Furthermore, this study corroborates an assumption in the rational choice literature that those members with the most information are the first movers.     

Las Cortes de Castilla y León bajo los Austrias: Una interpretación

Trowbridge H. Ford, Albert Venn Dicey, The Man and His Times (Barry Rose Publishers Ltd., Chichester, 1985; pp.354; £19.50/$30.00)     

The Social Basis of Voting Correctly

A large literature has established that people learn from political discussion, and some scholars suggest that people will make better choices if they engage in political discussion with opinion leaders. To establish that discussion promotes better vote choices, however, we have to create a measure of rational choice to test the impact of discussion. Recently, scholars have used Lau and Redlawsk's voting correctly measure to test the impact of various influences on the rationality of vote choice. Using this new measure of rationality—voting correctly—I determine whether political discussion has the predicted positive impact. To test this theory, I use 2000 American National Election Study survey data, and show that greater political discussion with knowledgeable discussants leads to more correct voting.     

Effectiveness of contamination prevention procedures in a trace explosives laboratory.

The effectiveness of a number of the explosives contamination prevention controls that are adopted within the Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL) principal trace laboratory has been scrutinised. Within the trace laboratory, rigorous procedures for processing forensic swab samples for traces of organic explosives are routinely adopted by forensic scientists. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of these procedures, and the principle of separating the sample from the laboratory and the forensic scientist, explosives-free swab samples and appropriate controls have been processed, in accordance with trace laboratory procedures, in several explosives contaminated environments. In all cases, no explosives were detected in the post-processing samples, demonstrating that the contamination prevention procedures are effective, robust and fit-for-purpose.