Reproductive behaviour in the Lutheran urban family from historical Poland (the Parish of St. Peter from Poznań, the second half of the nineteenth century)

Fertility and reproductive behaviour in the nineteenth-century Lutheran family from the city of Poznań was characterized. Use was made of the St. Peter parish (Peterkirche) registers from 1840s to 1870s, upon which reconstructions of the individual histories of 463 families were based. Fertility was assessed on the basis of the length of between-birth intervals according to their order and age of women. Next, the age-specific fertility rates of women f_x and Coale Index of marital fertility I_g were calculated. From a seasonal rhythm of both marital and illegitimate births, and reconstructed on the basis of these, the annual rhythm of marital and prenuptial conceptions were characterized. In the Lutheran Parish of St. Peter from the city of Poznań illegitimate births and prenuptial conceptions accounted for almost 10% and over 5% of all births, respectively. Lack of seasonality for marital births was noted here. Illegitimate births, by contrast, were characterized by a statistically significant annual rhythm: their maximum was noted in April, which was a result of conceptions during summer. The average woman with completed reproduction cycle gave birth to the first and to the last child at the ages of 29 and 40 years, respectively. She therefore used 32% of her whole reproductive period. Late age of birth of the first child was associated with late age of marriage of women (on average 28 years). An average woman with completed reproduction gave birth to 4.8 children. The average length of the protogenesic interval was 18 months. The highest fertility occurred in women aged between 20 to 29 years. The value of the I_g index was 0.67, and proved a lack of birth control rather than conscious birth regulation. Generally, Lutheran women from Poznań were characterized by fairly high reproductive potential.     

Minimal Semantics and Legal Interpretation

In this paper I will tackle three issues. First, I aim to briefly outline the backbone of semantic minimalism, while focusing on the idea of ‘liberal truth conditions’ developed by Emma Borg in her book ‘Minimal Semantics’. Secondly, I will provide an account of the three principal views in legal interpretation: intentionalism, textualism and purposivism. All of them are based on a common denominator labelled by lawyers ‘literal meaning’. In the paper I suggest a novel way of viewing this common denominator as almost identical to the Borgian ‘liberal truth conditions’, at least at a conceptual level. In the third section I will focus on the conceptual similarities between the two ideas. I intend to depict that, although legal theorists do not admit it explicitly, they treat literal legal meaning as minimal propositional content that can be ascribed liberal truth conditions. There are two main objections to liberal truth conditions: their under-determinacy and unintuitive character. Both objections can be applied to ‘literal meaning’. However, the idea of liberal truth conditions gives an adequate account of what lawyers call literal meaning and is helpful in explaining the mechanism of understanding of provisions and reasons leading to the necessity of statutory interpretation.     

Drivers of political parties’ voting behaviour in European economic governance: the ultimate decline of the economic cleavage?

The article examines the factors that determined the attitude of parliamentary parties towards eurozone anti-crisis measures. Using a statistical logit model, it demonstrates that, while all governing parties supported such measures, opposition parties were divided. The support of the former is explicable in terms of international obligations. The positions of opposition parties reflected their attitude towards European integration: Eurosceptic parties tended to oppose anti-crisis measures. Furthermore, whereas negative votes were less likely in countries marked by higher levels of popular trust in government and satisfaction with the problem-solving capacity of the EU, the likelihood of no votes increased as a function of the level of trust in national parliaments. The policy preferences of opposition parties, measured on the economic left–right scale, did not provide significant explanatory potential; nor did an additional test measuring the impact of extreme left?right positions.     

Revisiting country of origin principle: Challenges related to regulating e-commerce in the European Union

The article analyses the country of origin principle of information society services in the light of harmonisation and unification efforts undertaken by the European lawgiver. Although the country of origin principle remains the key element of the construction of freedom to provide information society services, the principle itself suffers a number of both explicit and implicit restrictions which render its practical application a serious challenge. The difficulty is posed by the fact that the Electronic Commerce Directive fails to expressly specify both the scope of harmonisation as regards the principle, and the level of harmonisation of the directive itself. Furthermore, it is understood differently by private international lawyers. In the eDate Advertising case the ECJ ruled that the principle is not a conflict-of-laws rule, neither does it require implementation to the national legal systems in this shape. This is not to mean, however, that the debate over the function of the country of origin principle in private international law is over. Last but not least, there are many different types of country of origin principles applicable to various types of services provided via the Internet. This multitude of country of origin principles is perhaps the greatest weakness the regulatory approach adopted by the European lawmaker.     

Rethinking the notion of hosting in the aftermath of Delfi: Shifting from liability to responsibility?

Liability of Internet intermediaries for a third-party content is a complex topic, especially with regards to the storage of illegal or harmful postings offered by portals. The E-Commerce Directive offered a liberal framework for handling such cases, provided that a hosting service provider has not played an active role in content management. Being passive turned out to be the key precondition for immunity under safe harbour provisions. Yet, after the Delfi ruling the legal landscape has changed radically. Although the judgment of the Strasbourg tribunal has been dismissed in some jurisdictions as an error or one-off case, the truth is that it took into account acquis communautaire and imposed liability on the news portal, which followed the guidelines of Google France and eBay rulings. Given the lack of predictability of the current legal framework, the aim of this contribution is to offer a deep-dive into the notion of hosting from a technical perspective in order to better understand why Articles 14–15 of the E-Commerce Directive may require a re-examination. It is also submitted that portals and other online service providers relying on a broad construction of safe harbours should be entitled to Good Samaritan protection akin to section 230 of the American Communications Decency Act in order not to hold them liable for being active in fighting hate speech and other forms of illegal and harmful conduct.