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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Curses, Oaths, Ordeals And Tials Of Animals, Alan Watson Sep 1997

Curses, Oaths, Ordeals And Tials Of Animals, Alan Watson

Scholarly Works

To the outsider, a foreign legal system may at times appear irrational, with a belief in the efficacy, usually with supernatural assistance, of curses, oaths and ordeals, and that animals may properly be punished, even restrained from anti-human behaviour, after a criminal trial. But caution must be exercised. There may be little real belief that the deity will intervene-for instance, that the ordeal will reveal guilt or innocence. Rather, the society may be faced with an intolerable problem, with no reasonable solution, and the participants may resort to extraordinary legal measures as a "Last Best Chance", or "The Second Best". …


Continuity And Rupture In "New Approaches To Comparative Law", Paolo G. Carozza Jan 1997

Continuity And Rupture In "New Approaches To Comparative Law", Paolo G. Carozza

Journal Articles

In the course of this conference on "new approaches to comparative law;" it has struck me as curious that so little has been said about the "old" approaches to comparative law. In such a self-conscious effort to distinguish ourselves from our predecessors, one would expect at least some articulation of distinctive criteria, if not a full-fledged manifesto of novelty. Giinter Frankenberg gave us three ideal-type identities of the comparative lawyer; David Kennedy boxed up the old approaches in his taxonomical chart. They and others have referred to the expansion of capitalist market economics and liberal democratic political structures as the …