Understanding Justice: Criminal Courtroom Interpretation in Eighteenth-Century London and Twenty-First-Century Toronto1

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-299
Author(s):  
Karen A. Macfarlane
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Immigrant Population ◽  
First Century ◽  
Presumption Of Innocence ◽  
Legal Counsel ◽  
The Right ◽  
Law Of Evidence ◽  
Criminal Courtroom ◽  
Trial Participants

Abstract This paper compares criminal courtroom interpretation in present-day Toronto with eighteenth-century London. Eighteenth-century London, like Toronto, was home to a large immigrant population, and faced similar challenges. This article argues that expedience was the most important factor in shaping eighteenth-century criminal courtroom interpretation. The right to an interpreter is now a constitutional and common law right. Modern defendants enjoy greater protections, such as the developments of the presumption of innocence, the law of evidence, and the right to legal counsel. However, the attitudes of many Anglophone trial participants remain unchanged and negatively affect defendants who use interpreters.

Scales of Justice: Defense Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

1991 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Beattie
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Professional Training ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Criminal Trial ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
Defense Counsel ◽  
Trial Procedure ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Right

My subject is the story of the entry of lawyers into the English criminal courts and their impact on trial procedure. Until the eighteenth century lawyers played little part in the trial of felonies in England—in the trial, that is, of those accused of the most serious offenses, including murder, rape, arson, robbery, and virtually all forms of theft. Indeed, the defendants in such cases were prohibited at common law from engaging lawyers to act for them in court. In the case of less-serious crimes—misdemeanors—defendants were allowed counsel; and those accused of high treason, the most serious offense of all, were granted the right to make their defense by counsel in 1696. But not in felony. Accused felons might seek a lawyer's advice on points of law, but if they wanted to question the prosecution evidence or to put forward a defense, they had to do that on their own behalf. The victim of a felony (who most often acted as the prosecutor in a system that depended fundamentally on private prosecution) was free to hire a lawyer to manage the presentation of his or her case. But in fact few did so. The judges were generally the only participants in felony trials with professional training. They dominated the courtroom and orchestrated the brief confrontation between the victim and the accused that was at the heart of the trial.

The Republic of Bees

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-126
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Constitutions ◽  
System A ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Law ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Law Of Evidence

This chapter details changes in American law from the eighteenth century onward, covering federal and state constitutions, judges, organization of courts, and civil procedure, and the law of evidence. The colonies declared themselves independent in 1776. However, American law continued to borrow from English law. English doctrines that were needed and appropriate were welcome. Between 1776, and the middle of the nineteenth century, there developed a true republic of bees; their flowers were the social and economic institutions that grew up in the United States. American conditions and ideas were the lawmakers that made American law a distinctive system: a separate language within the common-law family.

Liberty and the Common Law

1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Case System ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.

scholarly journals Ireland: Curtailment of the right to silence through statutory adverse inferences

2021 ◽  
pp. 203228442110283
Author(s):  
Yvonne M. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Presumption Of Innocence ◽  
Legal Assistance ◽  
Criminal Proceedings ◽  
European Court ◽  
Right To Silence ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Access ◽  
Police Questioning

In Ireland, the right to silence has been significantly impacted by the legislative introduction of adverse inference provisions. In specified circumstances, with varying threshold requirements, a suspect’s failure to answer questions or provide information during Garda (police) questioning can form the basis of an inference against them at trial. Ireland has not opted in to either Directive 2016/343/EU on the strengthening of certain aspects of the presumption of innocence or Directive 2013/48/EU on the right of access to a lawyer in criminal proceedings. This article examines the constitutional and common law context of the protection of the right to silence in Ireland; the operation, and expansion, of the statutory inference regime; the lack of legislative provision for a right to legal assistance during Garda interview; and relevant European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. While there are some benefits to overt legislation and safeguards attached to the drawing of inferences from pre-trial silence, the question must be asked whether a detained suspect in Ireland truly has a protected right to silence in real terms, given the proliferation of inference provisions.

Wronged in Her Dearest Rights: Plaintiff Wives and the Transformation of Marital Consortium, 1870–1920

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-99
Author(s):  
Kimberley A. Reilly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Legal Action ◽  
Legal Remedies ◽  
Legal Identity ◽  
Right Of Action ◽  
The Common ◽  
Hierarchical Nature ◽  
The Right

In 1871, Mary Ann Harlan brought an unprecedented suit against her neighbors, Elliot and Mary Clark, before the Superior Court of Cincinnati. She alleged that they had “wrongfully and maliciously enticed away” her husband, Robert Harlan, from their home, thus depriving her of Robert's “society, protection, and support.” The common law had long given husbands the right of action to sue third parties who enticed away, harbored, alienated the affections of, or seduced their wives. In these types of marital torts, a husband sought damages for the loss of his wife's “consortium,” a term that expressed his property in her services and society. At the time of Mary Ann's suit, however, wives had no such reciprocal right. In part, this was an outcome of the common law doctrine of marital unity, or coverture, under which a wife's legal identity was merged into that of her husband upon marriage. Unable to sue or be sued, she had to be joined by him in a legal action. Courts were hardly amenable to the idea of allowing husbands to join in suits involving their own marital transgressions, where they would stand to profit from their misdeeds if any damages were awarded. More fundamentally, however, the limitation of wives' access to legal remedies was an expression of the hierarchical nature of marital unity. No less an authority than eighteenth-century English jurist William Blackstone, the most influential expositor of the common law, put the reason plainly: “the inferior hath no kind of property in the company, care, or assistance of the superior, as the superior is held to have in those of the inferior; and therefore the inferior can suffer no loss or injury.” According to this theory, a wife was not barred from bringing such a suit simply because of her legal disabilities under coverture; as a subordinate in the marriage relation, she lacked any reciprocal claim to her husband's society. Mary Ann's case, then, hinged on whether she had the right to bring her suit.

1. Introduction, principles, and key concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Spencer ◽  
John Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Fair Trial ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Presumption Of Innocence ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Human Rights Act ◽  
Human Rights Act 1998 ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Law Of Evidence

This chapter introduces the principles and key concepts underlying the law of evidence, with an emphasis on criminal evidence. It first explains the distinction between the law of evidence and evidence itself before turning to a discussion of fair trial by looking at Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), now part of English law as a result of the Human Rights Act 1998. The chapter then considers the main provisions related to evidence, including the presumption of innocence; privilege against self-incrimination; the right to examine witnesses; and admissibility of evidence obtained through covert surveillance, entrapment, or disclosure. It concludes by highlighting the importance of analysis of the relevance of the facts in a trial.

The Bible in American Law

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel L. Dreisbach
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Common Law ◽  
First Century ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
British North America ◽  
The Bible ◽  
American Law ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Constitutional Tradition

The Bible has had a significant impact on American law and constitutional tradition. The early colonists who settled in British North America brought with them the English common law, a system of jurisprudence that its leading authorities claimed was based on Christianity. Moreover, laws framed in the colonies, especially in New England’s Puritan commonwealths, drew explicitly and extensively on biblical law. As secular and separationists perspectives gained a following in the second half of the eighteenth century and the centuries thereafter, the Bible’s influence on law faced increasing challenges, and only laws that can be defended on secular grounds have survived into the twenty-first century.

The Problem of the Twenty-first Century Is the Problem of the Color Line as It Intersects the Nativity Line

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Prewitt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Center Of Gravity ◽  
First Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
The Right ◽  
Line P

This chapter argues that the center of gravity is shifting because of an intricate interplay between America's color line and its nativity line. It uses the color line concept to ask whether America has the right policy tools to fully erase the line that separated whites and racial minorities throughout America's history. If they merge—if immigrants are racialized—the future sadly repeats America's past. If, instead, America's population becomes so diverse and multiracial that the color line disappears, an altogether different future is in store, perhaps the promised postracial society. However, it is not certain whether this social process will strengthen or weaken a color line inherited from the eighteenth century, strengthened across the next century and a half, and then challenged but not fully erased by the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century.

scholarly journals THE EVIDENCE OF ANONYMOUS WITNESSES IN CRIMINAL COURTS: NOW AND INTO THE FUTURE

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Alan George Ward
Keyword(s):  
Fair Trial ◽  
First Century ◽  
Criminal Courts ◽  
England And Wales ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Law Of Evidence ◽  
The Impact

Anonymous witness evidence, the use of which had quietly expanded in the early part of the twenty-first century in criminal courts in England and Wales, was significantly curtailed by the House of Lords in the case of R v Davis. Little over a month later the government had enacted legislation to minimise the impact of their Lordships’ ruling, yet the long-term future of this area of the criminal law of evidence remains undetermined. This article seeks to assess what impact the Criminal Evidence (Witness Anonymity) Act 2008 has had on the right to a fair trial in England and Wales and, subsequently, to weigh up the options for long-term reform in this area of the law. It will be submitted that the stated policy aim of the government, the protection of witnesses, can be achieved for the long-term without impeding or undermining the absolute right of the defendant to a fair trial.

A Tracer Study of ICT Graduate Students at Mzuzu University, Malawi

Mousaion ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chimango Nyasulu ◽  
Winner Chawinga ◽  
George Chipeta
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Mobile Application ◽  
First Century ◽  
Application Development ◽  
Job Requirements ◽  
Level Of Satisfaction ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Quantitative Design ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University

Governments the world over are increasingly challenging universities to produce human resources with the right skills sets and knowledge required to drive their economies in this twenty-first century. It therefore becomes important for universities to produce graduates that bring tangible and meaningful contributions to the economies. Graduate tracer studies are hailed to be one of the ways in which universities can respond and reposition themselves to the actual needs of the industry. It is against this background that this study was conducted to establish the relevance of the Department of Information and Communication Technology at Mzuzu University to the Malawian economy by systematically investigating occupations of its former students after graduating from the University. The study adopted a quantitative design by distributing an online-based questionnaire with predominantly closed-ended questions. The study focused on three key objectives: to identify key employing sectors of ICT graduates, to gauge the relevance of the ICT programme to its former students’ jobs and businesses, and to establish the level of satisfaction of the ICT curriculum from the perspectives of former ICT graduates. The key findings from the study are that the ICT programme is relevant to the industry. However, some respondents were of the view that the curriculum should be strengthened by revising it through an addition of courses such as Mobile Application Development, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Data Mining, and LINUX Administration to keep abreast with the ever-changing ICT trends and job requirements. The study strongly recommends the need for regular reviews of the curriculum so that it is continually responding to and matches the needs of the industry.

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