The “Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill” Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England

1982 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy F. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Victorian England ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Family Purity

In 1835 the English Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst introduced into the House of Lords a bill to correct an ambiguity in the law concerning marriages within prohibited degrees. The existing law, based on the 1533 Henrican statute fixing the degrees of consanguinity and affinity, specified that marriages within prohibited degrees could be annulled at any time within the lifetime of both spouses by the Ecclesiastical Court. Lord Lyndhurst argued that the uncertain status of such “voidable marriages” created an inconvenience and hardship for the married persons and especially for their children, who could during their parents' lifetime be declared illegitimate. His specific motive was to guarantee the legitimacy and inheritance of the son of the seventh Duke of Beaufort, who had married his deceased wife's half-sister, a relationship within the prohibited degrees. Lyndhurst proposed that parliament pass a bill to limit to two years the time within which marriages could be annulled.The consensus in parliament was that the ambiguity of “voidable marriages” should be eliminated, and they readily passed a revised form of Lord Lyndhurst's bill, declaring that all marriages within the prohibited degrees of affinity contracted before August 31, 1835 were immediately and absolutely valid. Yet, even as they eased restrictions on existing marriages, they tightened the law for the future by adding a clause which made marriages of both affinity and consanguinity contracted after that date absolutely void.In the parliamentary debate on the bill, there was some opposition from those who argued that marriages within certain degrees of affinity, in particular a man and his deceased wife's sister, should be permitted.

Divorce and the Lord Chancellor: Looking to the Future or Getting Back to Basics?

1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-262
Author(s):  
Andrew Bainham
Keyword(s):  
Family Values ◽  
Green Paper ◽  
Mixed System ◽  
Neutral Process ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
Lord Chancellor ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Law Commission

The Government is keen to get “back to basics” about divorce. The Green Paper which the Lord Chancellor presented to Parliament in December 1993 invites us all to reflect on family values and is intended to provoke a “thorough national consideration” of the whole basis for divorce. It follows proposals by the Law Commission but is less than a ringing endorsement of the Commission's scheme. The Law Commission has advocated a shift from the current “mixed” system (embracing fault and no-fault grounds) to an entirely no-fault basis for divorce. Under these proposals divorce would be regarded as a neutral “process over time” and would not entail judgments into the causes of marriage breakdown. While the Green Paper gives qualified support to this idea, the Government has yet to reach a concluded view.

Speaking of Illness: Nerves, Narratives, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Susan Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
Medical Opinion ◽  
Legislative Authority ◽  
Empirical Fact ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Female Defendant ◽  
Critical Boundary ◽  
The Law ◽  
Lord Chancellor

In 1862 parliament deliberated the Lunacy Regulation Bill, which stipulated that medical testimony keep to the broad road of “fact” and not stray into the crooked alleyways of speculative “opinion.” During its debates, the House of Lords sometimes sounded like a parliamentary annex of Punch, or of Swift's Academy of Projectors. Decrying how “the very idea of a mad doctor's examination has become a by-word,” the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) and the Earl of Shaftesbury furnished anecdotes pointing to which way forensic madness lies: in the neighborhood of the lunacy expert who pronounced a fashionable lady deranged for sporting a dagger (“Dear me,” she protested, “if I am insane for that reason, nine-tenths of the ladies in Paris are insane too”); the eminent physician who detected incipient madness in a four-year-old whose cranium exceeded the sanity standard by ½″; the learned gentleman who diagnosed “fatuity and mania” in a female defendant because she could not tell “how much £100 a year was a week,” an impromptu sum which also flummoxed its proposer (“Don't be nervous,” coaxed the cross-examining counsel, “how much is it?”). While no one advocated barring the testimony of medical men entirely, many were reluctant to grant too much influence to paid witnesses interested in advertising expertise, and whose professional bonnets, it would appear, buzzed with their own pet-theoretical bees. The legal distinction between sanity and insanity was not to be drawn lightly for in many respects it was a property line, the critical boundary between free agency and economic wardship. The pertinent questions, argued the Economist, were simply two: “Is A B fit to manage his money? Did A B commit a particular act with … a knowledge that it was wrong, or did he not do it?” As Lord Westbury noted, medical opinion could confuse these issues because doctors and lawyers share deceptively similar terms of art — “lunacy,” “imbecility,” “unsoundness” — but apply them differently and according to incompatible evidentiary procedures. Medicine considers insanity as a matter of disease, he asserted; the law, as a matter of “fact.” In its efforts to serve justice by excluding quackery, the House of Lords burnished its own legislative authority by portraying medicine as self-interested and compromised by multiple interpretive perspectives, and by characterizing the law, by contrast, as reliably linked to empirical fact. What from afar might look like a seamless medico-juridical institution is in truth scored with hairline fractures, if not sizable rifts.

Cranford

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Gaskell ◽  
Dinah Birch
Keyword(s):  
Social Contexts ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Personal Tragedy ◽  
The Way

A man … is so in the way in the house!’ A vivid and affectionate portrait of a provincial town in early Victorian England, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford describes a community dominated by its independent and refined women. Undaunted by poverty, but dismayed by changes brought by the railway and by new commercial practices, the ladies of Cranford respond to disruption with both suspicion and courage. Miss Matty and her sister Deborah uphold standards and survive personal tragedy and everyday dramas; innovation may bring loss, but it also brings growth, and welcome freedoms. Cranford suggests that representatives of different and apparently hostile social worlds, their minds opened by sympathy and suffering, can learn from each other. Its social comedy develops into a study of generous reconciliation, of a kind that will value the past as it actively shapes the future. This edition includes two related short pieces by Gaskell, ‘The Last Generation in England’ and ‘The Cage at Cranford’, as well as a selection from the diverse literary and social contexts in which the Cranford tales take their place.

Judicial Legislation

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Oliver Aylmerton
Keyword(s):  
Judicial System ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
Central Topic ◽  
The People ◽  
Parliamentary Debate ◽  
The Law ◽  
Elected Representatives

The author describes the main characteristics of the English judicial system and its methodology. A central topic is the so-called judicial legislation, as is illustrated by the developing case lawwith respect to the tort of negligence. The method has the twin advantages of flexibility and pragmatism and it also has the advantages of speed. But there is a minus side also. First, the development of the law in this way can only be achieved at the expense of certainty. Secondly, it involves the alteration of the law, sometimes a quite radical alteration, without any extensive consideration of the practical and economic results such as would take place in the course of parliamentary scrutiny and debate. Judges are not the elected representatives of the people and the methodology of English Judges which results in the development and alteration of the law without the benefit of parliamentary debate may not perhaps be altogether a satisfactory democratic process to a constitutional purist.

The House of Lords on the Law of Trespass to Realty and Children as Trespassers

1910 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 491
Author(s):  
F. M. B. ◽  
Thomas Beven
Keyword(s):  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Law

Consent after the House of Lords: Taking and leading astray the Law of Theft

Legal Studies ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-322
Author(s):  
Mitchell C. Davies
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Law ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Specific Definition

The objectives of the Criminal Law Revision Committee when drafting the radical reforms proposed by the 1966 Theft Bill were described by a contemporary commentator2 as being: ‘. . . to do away with the more embarrassing and restrictive technicalities of the existing law . . .’In the same place it was observed that the Committee faced a choice between creating a specific definition of the various theft offences and their elements, or one whose generality would allow it to evolve to meet the challenges presented by ever more complex and sophisticated dishonest dealing.

scholarly journals Culpability, Kingston and the Law Commission

2010 ◽  
Vol 74 (5) ◽  
pp. 434-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cath Crosby
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
Character Theory ◽  
Criminal Offence ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Law ◽  
Court Of Appeal ◽  
Law Commission ◽  
Do So

This article considers the basis upon which a person should be held to be criminally liable, and to do so, it is necessary to examine the leading theories of character and choice that underpin the State holding a person to be culpable of a criminal offence, i.e. the link between culpability and fault. The case of R v Kingston1 is used to examine the application of these leading theories and it is observed that choice theorists would not excuse such a defendant from criminal liability even though his capacity to make a choice to refrain from law breaking was made extremely difficult by external factors beyond his control. Only character theory could possibly offer exculpation in such circumstances on the basis that the defendant acted ‘out of character’ and his deed did not deserve the full censure and punishment of the criminal law. The Court of Appeal in R v Kingston would have been prepared to excuse, but the House of Lords, and most recently the Law Commission have adopted a pragmatic approach to the involuntarily intoxicated offender. This case serves as a reminder that while justice is the aim of the criminal justice system, it is not an absolute standard.

The Trial of the Future: Challenge to the Law

1963 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 393
Author(s):  
Walter V. Schaefer ◽  
Bernard Botein ◽  
Murray Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Future Challenge ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law

scholarly journals Love in the time of Covid-19: a case-study of the complex laws governing weddings

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rebecca Probert ◽  
Stephanie Pywell
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Marriage Law ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
General Law ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fit For Purpose ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Impact

Abstract During 2020, weddings were profoundly affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. During periods of lockdown few weddings could take place, and even afterwards restrictions on how they could be celebrated remained. To investigate the impact of such restrictions, we carried out a survey of those whose plans to marry in England and Wales had been affected by Covid-19. The 1,449 responses we received illustrated that the ease and speed with which couples had been able to marry, and sometimes whether they had been able to marry at all, had depended not merely on the national restrictions in place but on their chosen route into marriage. This highlights the complexity and antiquity of marriage law and reinforces the need for reform. The restrictions on weddings taking place also revealed the extent to which couples valued getting married as opposed to having a wedding. Understanding both the social and the legal dimension of weddings is important in informing recommendations as to how the law should be changed in the future, not merely to deal with similar crises but also to ensure that the general law is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

The Conseil Constitutionnel and Judicial Review

1991 ◽  
Vol 12 (x) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Richard Cicchillo
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Ancien Regime ◽  
Similar System ◽  
Modern France ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ancien Régime ◽  
The Revolution

For Americans, long accustomed to judicial review of the law, the traditional absence of a similar system of constitutional control in France comes as a surprise. Closer examination however, reveals that the French politico-historico-judicial tradition inherited from the Ancien Régime and the Revolution of 1789 is deeply opposed to the development of "government by the judges." Why did the Revolution react against the judiciary? How has the idea of constitutional control evolved in modern France? What are the possible sources of legitimacy for an institution (the Conseil constitutionnel) and a concept (judicial review) cut off from the sanction of tradition? What is the future of the Conseil?

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