Criminological Policy of the Russian Federation: the Concept of Judicial Reform and Justice of the Peace

The article presents a legal approach to the problem of the influence of the judicial system segment of Russian criminological policy on the effectiveness of the general prevention of deviant behavior. Within this framework, the authors compare the assumptions of the program documents that described the criminological parameters of justice of the peace during its introduction in the contemporary judicial system, and the results achieved by this introduction. By analyzing the Decree of the Supreme Council of the RSFSR «On the Concept of Judicial Reform in the RSFSR», the authors demonstrate that this document was aimed at legitimizing confederative relationships in the Russian Federation with the design of the judicial system of «cooperative federalism» type. The justice of the peace, whose status and jurisdiction are only schematically outlined in the Concept of Judicial Reform, was to play a decorative role in the political and ideological support of the achievement of a far more ambitious goal. The transformation of Russia into a state of «cooperative federalism» with extreme asymmetry of its subjects would have meant the removal of the opportunity for the justices of the peace to perform the criminological function of courts. The introduction of justices of the peace simultaneously with the adoption of their own codes of material and procedural law in the republics of the RSFSR predetermined the creation of legal systems independent of the federal center in each Russian subject and the blocking of the criminological function of the courts. At the same time, a retrospect reference to the legal tradition of the Russian Empire formed an erroneous understanding of Russian justice of the peace as a unified (since 1864) judicial system, and lead to the development of abstract projects that hindered the implementation of the crime prevention potential of justice of the peace. The result of the criminological policy of the Russian Federation in 1991–1996 was the structuring of the court system of the Russian Federation which was different from the model presented in the Concept of Judicial Reform. The conducted research showed that justice of the peace in Russia duly influences crime prevention.

O sędziach pokoju w pracach Komisji Kodyfikacyjnej II Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej

The article presents work on the unification of the Polish judiciary in the Second Republic in the years 1918–1928. It was carried out in three tracks. The initiator of the first moves consisting in unification of district regulations, reorganisation and taking over the judiciary was the government and the Ministry of Justice. Since February 1919, these measures were supported and approved by the Legislative Sejm (later the Sejm). Since November 1919 the burden of work was taken over by the Codification Commission of the Republic of Poland. The aim of this article is to discuss the course of work on the law on the system of common courts within the Codification Committee of the Republic of Poland, with particular emphasis on the provisions on justices of the peace. From this point of view, it will help to solve the main research problem of the article: to what extent did the Polish Codification Commission contribute to shaping the institution of justices of the peace in the Ordinance of the President of the Republic of Poland on Law on the System of Judiciary of 6 February 1928. The article makes use of archival materials, protocols from the sessions of the Codification Commission of the Second Polish Republic, the legal literature of the Second Republic and the current literature on the subject.

Problems of interaction between police village constables and magistrates as a form of reflection of the essence of bourgeois reforms of the second half of the 19th century in Russia

The article is devoted to the insufficiently studied problem of interaction between the institutions of the magistrate’s court and police officials in the second half of the 19th century. The powers of a magistrate, as a representative of the judiciary, enshrined in the Charter of Criminal Proceedings, the Charter on Punishments Imposed by Justices of the Peace, were not limited to considering the case and bringing the guilty persons to justice, but made it possible to issue warnings to police officials. The procedural status of a police village constable was regulated by the charter of criminal proceedings and departmental regulations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Having consistently studied literary sources and archival materials, the author comes to the conclusion that procedural powers have found their application in the activities of police village constables. However, the lack of professional training and sufficient knowledge of regulatory legal acts became an obstacle in the implementation of the procedural powers of a police village constable. For the admission of violations of the fulfillment of the assigned duties when drawing up procedural acts against the guilty persons, the justices of the peace issued warnings to the police officials and reported this to the prosecutor. A commission created with the participation of representatives of the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the second and the third sections of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancery to discuss the issue «On the abolition of the right granted to the magistrate courts by article 53 of the charter of criminal proceedings of the right to issue warnings to police officers» considered the powers of the magistrate court to prosecute police officials.

‘A Great Number of … Women’?: The Changing Involvement of Female Workers in Master and Servant Cases in England, 1685-1860

Between the late seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries in England, female workers’ involvement in employment disputes that were summarily adjudicated by Justices of the Peace (magistrates) under master and servant law decreased. Women’s diminishing work opportunities in arable agriculture after the late eighteenth century likely contributed to this downward trend. However, female textile workers were a notable exception, as manufacturers and magistrates used employment law to coerce greater productivity from them. Master and servant prosecutions both reflected changes in women’s occupational patterns and served as a means to exploit a feminized textile labour force that was crucial to industrialization and to our interpretation of its nature and causes.

‘Scandalus to all us’: presenting an anti-alehouse petition from late Elizabethan Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire)

In the early summer of 1588, twenty-seven inhabitants of the large parish of Rickmansworth (Hertfordshire) presented a petition to two local Justices of the Peace complaining about disorder in Mill End, on the outskirts of the main town, caused by those frequenting Richard Heyward’s alehouse. Most recent work on alehouse sociability has considered attitudes towards drinking and its regulation after the early Jacobean legislation; in contrast, this article considers attitudes towards drunkenness in late sixteenth-century England, including the views expressed in the official ‘homily against drunkenness’ and in the Sabbatarian pamphlet published in 1572 by Humfrey Roberts. Similarly, most work on early modern protest considers complaints against the activities of the protestors’ social superiors; in this instance petitioners complained about the conduct of their inferiors. Although, due to archival attrition, it is impossible to determine what action the authorities took against Heyward and his clientele, thanks to the chance survival of a personal letter it is possible to reconstruct the reactions of the JPs to whom the petition was addressed, thus shedding light on how JPs might act outside the Quarter Sessions.

FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF DESIGNING AND IMPLEMENTING A CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAMME “DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN THE ACTIVITIES OF JUSTICES OF THE PEACE”

The article addresses topical issues related to the advanced training of the judiciary and the use of digital technologies in the work of justices of the peace. The idea of the need to design, develop and implement a continuing education programme for the judicial system “Digital Technologies in the Activities of Justices of the Peace” in the supplementary education system is raised. The programme is designed to develop the competence of assistants and secretaries of justices of the peace and aims to increase their effectiveness by recording the proceedings of court hearings through the use of the NESTOR software package. The authors consider the main areas involved in digitalization of justice of the piece courts. The determining factor in organizing and conducting a professional development programme for specialists in 2019 was to equip all judicial sections of Tula region with special equipment that technically allows recordinga court session by audio recording. Considering the inexperience of the staff while operating such equipment and maintaining technologies, it was decided to organize and conduct additional training for justices of the peace and staff of the system to work with new software and hardware systems installed...

Magistrates and their Courts

The office of justice of the peace, or magistrate, is an ancient one first mentioned in 1264. As early as 1361 the Justices of the Peace Act provided for the appointment in each county of ‘one lord and three or four of the most worthy in the county with some learned in the law’ whose duty it would be to ‘pursue, arrest … and chastise’ offenders and rioters, and take surety of good behaviour ‘towards the King and his people’ from those who were not ‘of good fame’. The magistrates retain their original function of assisting in the keeping of the peace, and, to further that end, can still bind a person over to keep the peace or be of good behaviour even though no offence has been proved against him.