Charges Of Conspiracy Research Articles

Pathfinding and Connections in the Life of Small Reformed Communities in Budapest. The Contexts of the 1967 YMCA Trial

In July 1967, the communist political police arrested five members of Keresztyén Ifjúsági Egyesület (the Hungarian equivalent of the YMCA), which had been dissolved in 1950, on charges of conspiracy against the state. Among those arrested were pastors, elders, and a former deacon. The trial is considered to be the last politically motivated trial against the Reformed Church and the most significant of all state security actions against the Reformed in Hungary. In order to understand the background of the trial and the changing considerations of church policy and state security surrounding it, it is necessary to look at how the image and political approach of the decisive actors of church policy had evolved by the 1960s. On the other hand, the documents produced by the party-state can be examined not only from the perspective of power but also from that of communities in action: what were the individual and collective strategies for active Christianity in the first decades of the Kádár regime? What were the individual and collective aspirations, adaptation techniques, and patterns of value transmission that can be discerned among different groups, congregations, youth communities, and their leaders in Reformed Christianity? Which forms of church or religious behaviours were considered dangerous by the party-state, and how did it set forth for the church policy enforcement bodies the activities it considered to be within the category of church or religious resistance and opposition? Keywords: communist church policy, Hungarian Reformed Church, political trial, religious resistance, YMCA

Activities of the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR Pavlo Yakovlevych Meshyk (1953)

The article examines the insufficiently studied in historical and legal science issue of the activities of such a controversial political figure of the first post-Stalin months of 1953 as Pavlo Yakovlevych Meshyk. It is emphasised that he, having a university degree (which was rare for NKVD personnel in those years) and significant organisational skills, made a successful career in the central apparatus of the People’s Commissariat in the late 1930s. This was also due to the patronage of P. Meshyk by L. Beria. P. Meshyk was directly involved in Stalin’s repressions. In 1941, at the age of 30, he first became People’s Commissar for State Security of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1943, he was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General. From 1945 until March 1953, he worked on the implementation of the Soviet nuclear project. He was awarded the Order of Lenin (1949) for his active participation in the implementation of the nuclear programme, and later even received the Stalin Prize in Science and Technology (1951). In March 1953, he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic, where he pursued a policy of strengthening the rule of law in the activities of the state security agencies and purging them of the most odious and incompetent employees. At the same time, a policy was implemented to rid the state security agencies of their dependence on the influence of the Communist Party. At the same time, P. Meshyk came into conflict with some party officials, including the then leader of the republic, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the CP(B)U, L. Melnikov. As a result, L. Melnikov was dismissed. P. Meshyk also took some measures to “root” the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, translated the ministry’s office work into Ukrainian, eased some of the Soviet government’s repressive policies towards the Ukrainian national liberation movement, actually restored the normal operation of Lviv State University, and improved contacts with Western Ukrainian intellectuals. These were positive aspects of the minister’s activities that can be assessed as attempts at reform. However, P. Meshyk stayed in the post of Minister of the Interior for only three months. In June 1953, he was arrested and later convicted on charges of treason and conspiracy to seize power, and in December of the same year, Meshyk was shot dead. He was partially rehabilitated in 2000.

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

A review of the court of appeal’s decision in Aliyu V. Federal republic of Nigeria & ORS

In 2017, the EFCC instituted an action at the Niger State High Court against Muazu Babaginda Aliyu, the former Governor of Niger State. While the case was still on and before it could be concluded, the EFCC instituted another case on money laundering at the Federal High Court, Abuja. The appellant believed that contrary to s. 36(9) of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution, it was a case of double jeopardy for both cases to be filed against him in relation to the same funds. The appellant’s argument was founded on the belief that the charges of conspiracy and conversion of ecological funds filed at the State High Court were one and the same with the charges of money laundering at the Federal High Court. The appellant also argued that the Federal High Court was the court with jurisdiction and not the State High Court. He raised an objection on both issues at the State High Court but was ruled against leading to an approach of the Court of Appeal. The Court of Appeal was then faced with the task of (i) distinguishing between the charges filed at both courts (ii) deciding which court had jurisdiction to entertain the charges (iii) determine whether there was a case of double jeopardy.

Extraterritorial offending, extradition, and Australia’s case against Hew Griffiths

ABSTRACT This paper outlines a range of factors associated with extradition and transnational online intellectual property offending by examining the Australian case of Hew Griffiths. In documenting key legal issues from available domestic and international verdicts examining this case, we show how broad legislative drafting in Australia works alongside the decision to initiate conspiracy charges to favour extradition. We also examine how Australian legal requirements that remove the presumption of bail for transnational fugitives limit the prospect of mounting a fair defence against extradition and during a foreign trial, and the limited direct impact of determinations by the United Nations Human Rights Committee on these national processes. We critically discuss the implications of these rulings in the Griffiths case in light of the evolving role of extradition law in a digital age and their implications on theories of criminal jurisdiction founded on the principle of extraterritoriality.

Can Precision Policing Reduce Gun Violence? Evidence from “Gang Takedowns” in New York City

AbstractDuring the last decade, while national homicide rates have remained flat, New York City has experienced a second great crime decline, with gun violence declining by more than 50 percent since 2011. In this paper, we investigate one potential explanation for this dramatic and unexpected improvement in public safety—the New York Police Department's shift to a more surgical form of “precision policing,” in which law enforcement focuses resources on a small number of individuals who are thought to be the primary drivers of violence. We study New York City's campaign of “gang takedowns” in which suspected members of criminal gangs were arrested in highly coordinated raids and prosecuted on conspiracy charges. We show that gun violence in and around public housing communities fell by approximately one third in the first year after a gang takedown. Our estimates imply that gang takedowns explain nearly one quarter of the decline in gun violence in New York City's public housing communities over the last eight years.

U.S. Arrest of Former Mexican Defense Minister on Drug Charges Poses Challenges for Future Counter-Narcotics Cooperation

In October 2020, the United States arrested former Mexican Defense Secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda on drug conspiracy charges, accusing him of accepting bribes to aid a Mexican cartel in evading law enforcement and transporting drugs into the United States. Cienfuegos's arrest sparked diplomatic protests from Mexico, which negotiated to gain Cienfuegos's release before exonerating him and publicizing the U.S. investigation file in what the United States called a breach of the countries’ mutual legal assistance treaty. The incident also prompted Mexico to pass a new law curtailing cooperation with foreign agents and potentially imperiling the long-standing U.S.-Mexico alliance in the fight against cross-border drug trafficking.

Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby

Reviewed by: Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman by Susan M. Reverby Emily K. Hobson Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman. By Susan M. Reverby. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 393. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5625-0.) In Co-Conspirator for Justice: The Revolutionary Life of Dr. Alan Berkman, Susan M. Reverby offers an absorbing and deeply researched biography of Alan Berkman, a doctor, political prisoner, and global AIDS activist. Reverby, who is a well-known historian of public health, grew up with Berkman in Middletown, New York, attending college with him at Cornell University and remaining "distant friends" until his death (p. 2). Critical of Berkman's involvement in the armed underground yet empathetically drawn to her subject, Reverby engagingly animates the movements at the center of Berkman's life. Born on September 4, 1945, and raised in a Jewish family that moved from the working class into the middle class, Berkman was radicalized while in medical school at Columbia University, which, through the influence of the 1968 student strike, Black Panther Party health clinics, and efforts to democratize Lincoln Hospital, became a kind of laboratory for the health Left. Berkman's commitment to do no harm drew him toward supporting selfdefense against state violence. He provided care to prisoners injured at the Attica prison uprising and to Native activists in the Wounded Knee occupation and, starting in the mid-1970s, became a leader in three interrelated organizations of white anti-imperialists—the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the May 19th Communist Organization (May 19th), and the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee. [End Page 367] In 1981 Berkman provided emergency medical care to activists in the aftermath of the attempted robbery of a Brink's armored truck, a disastrous action that was intended to fund the Black Liberation Army and that resulted in the deaths of a Brink's guard and two police officers. The robbery became the focal point of an array of grand jury investigations and conspiracy charges; Berkman was jailed for refusing to provide information and then indicted with others as an accessory after the fact. In 1983 he went underground with fellow members of May 19th, and for two years he helped carry out several bombings of government and industry buildings, all without harm to individuals. Long interested in prison health care, Berkman experienced its inadequacy firsthand after his capture in 1985. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, he found his life at risk as a result of medical negligence in prison, and he survived due largely to his own knowledge and connections. During the time he was held in the Marion Control Unit, a severe isolation facility that later closed due to international protest, he was the only licensed doctor in the prison. Berkman was convicted and sentenced to ten years on charges related to the Brink's robbery, and in 1988 he was indicted with six others for conspiracy bombing. The group, known as the Resistance Conspiracy codefendants, argued double jeopardy and termed their case a "testing ground" for government surveillance and the criminalization of dissent (p. 194). When Berkman's cancer returned, however, his codefendants agreed to guilty pleas and lengthy sentences in exchange for his charges being dismissed and the provision of cancer care. From his release in 1992 until his death in 2009, Berkman devoted himself to fighting HIV/AIDS. He became the medical director of an HIV/AIDS residential program, and after obtaining a fellowship and later a tenured professorship at Columbia, he researched HIV risk and prevention for people who were homeless, used drugs, were mentally ill, or had been imprisoned. Most significantly, he cofounded Health GAP, which won greater global access to HIV drugs through tactics ranging from insider advocacy to direct-action protest at the United Nations. In tracing Berkman's life, Reverby examines a white man's investments in anti-imperialism and feminism, a doctor's relationship to violence, and the centrality of health and medicine to the Left from the 1960s through the 1990s. Reverby draws skillfully on Berkman's unpublished papers, her own interviews...

Enforcement of Criminal Law on Crimes of Criminal Consensus Against State Security: Learning from Indonesia

The purpose of this legal research is to explain the first discussion, namely how to implement law enforcement against criminal conspiracy (samenspanning) which has been regulated in the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code. Second How is the imposition of sanctions for criminal conspiracy charges regulated in the Criminal Code in case Number: 293K / Pid / 2016. This type of research is normative research which is descriptive-analytical in nature, using secondary data with data collection techniques through library research and processing data qualitatively, it is concluded that law enforcement against criminal conspiracy is carried out by penal measures, penal measures are one of the efforts to enforce the law or all actions taken by law enforcement officials that focus more on eradication after a crime is committed under criminal law, namely criminal sanctions which constitute a threat to the perpetrator. The stages in this way include investigation, further investigation, prosecution, and so on, which in this case is part of criminal politics. The functionalization of criminal law is an effort to tackle crime through rational criminal law enforcement with the aim of creating the fulfillment of a sense of justice and efficiency. The imposition of sanctions Criminal sanctions imposed if a person has been proven to have committed a criminal act of treason can be punished with a criminal sentence contained in Article 106 of the Criminal Code with the threat of life imprisonment or twenty years in prison.

Harris , James The Great Fear: Stalin's Terror of the 1930s Vatlin , Alexander Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin's Secret Police by Seth Bernstein (review)

REVIEWS 781 impatient with political in-fighting and discussion. For them, as for Stalin, ‘democracy was something to aspire to, like communism itself — something for the distant future’ (p. 124). Ashortreviewcannotdojusticetotherichnessanddiversityofthiscollection, but it is hoped that the comments above will encourage a wide readership. Department of History Richard G. Robbins University of New Mexico Harris, James. The Great Fear: Stalin’s Terror of the 1930s. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2016. x + 205 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index.£30.00. Vatlin, Alexander. Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Seth Bernstein. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 2016. xxxiv + 171 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $64.95. The Great Terror of 1937–38 was, according to its leaders, aimed at stomping out a vast conspiratorial network of counterrevolutionaries in league with foreign intelligence services. Yet nearly all of the charges of conspiracy and treason were false. Rather than strengthening the Soviet Union, the Terror disrupted it — leaving it more vulnerable to foreign attack on the eve of World War Two. But if the Terror was so destructive, why did Stalin and his councillors unleash it? Did they miscalculate? Or were they in control of it at all? Observers sought answers to these questions from the very outset of the massacre. In October 1937 Leon Trotskii described it as the death throes of a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy without social support, lashing out in a vain attempt to squash all opposition. As the Terror wound down Arthur Koestler penned Darkness at Noon, which attributed Communist confessions of treason to fealty to an ideology that placed the collective good above the individual: ‘If the party requires it, I will confess…’ In the 1950s and ’60s both Leninist reformers and anti-Communists focused on Stalin’s paranoia and hunger for absolute power. In these accounts, charges of counterrevolution and treason masked the real motive, of squashing all imaginable opposition to Stalin’s power. This was the tack Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev took, thus evading wider Communist Party responsibility (including his own). In The Great Terror (1968), anti-Communist crusader Robert Conquest paradoxically took a similar position to Khrushchev’s, focusing on the demonic evil of Stalin and his NKVD deputies. In Conquest’s story, Stalin was the master-plotter, who had already planned the Terror by the autumn of 1933. SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 782 As popular audiences devoured Conquest, scholars were shifting their analyses of the Terror away from Stalin’s personality and leadership politics. Scholars such as Graeme Gill and J. Arch Getty focused instead on tension between Moscow and provincial political machines, showing that the latter often evaded Central Committee directives and concealed information from the centre. In the run-up to the Terror, Stalin and other central authorities expressed increasing frustration with the problem. One aspect of the Terror, then, was an attempt by Stalin et al. to impose discipline on the periphery by force. Most of the Terror’s victims were not political elites. Yet neither high politics or Stalin’s tyrannical personality, nor even centre-periphery conflict, seemed to explain this reality well. From the 1970s onward a number of historians (among them Moshe Lewin, Gabor Rittersporn, Roberta Manning and Sheila Fitzpatrick),pointedtoacomplexofsocialandlocalpoliticaldynamicsthatthey believed accelerated the massacres. In an under-governed ‘quicksand society’ destabilized by gigantic state initiatives, government efforts to exert control by encouraging denunciations of corrupt officials, spies and class enemies led to contagious fear. The result was rapidly propagating waves of denunciations to the security organs. When central authorities gave the organs the green light for mass repression, terror ran amok. The opening of the Soviet archives revealed that Stalin had indeed ordered the arrests and executions of tens if not hundreds of thousands. He had also driven a process in which top NKVD officials set quotas for arrests by local offices. While the numbers do not quite add up — we cannot trace all of the deaths and camp sentences directly to central orders — the archives left no doubt of Stalin’s ultimate responsibility for the Terror. At the same time, the dynamics described by the social historians (Lewin et...

Dylan Thomas’s “In Country Sleep”: His Paradoxical Sensibility

In “In Country Sleep”, Dylan Thomas offers the Yeatsian paradoxical sensibility, the process of magnanimous impersonal art as salvation to the tumultuous Auden who condescends to the mortal levelling charges of conspiracy, war mongering, tilting and toppling against him as his performance as an artist of Yeatsian pagan altruistic art songs has undone his success, popularity and appeal among the contemporary poets. Auden, despite the loss of his grandeur, continues with the Eliotian metaphysical process of aesthetic amoral art song that has made him great in the early phase. The time-conscious political poets of the thirties, while heading towards the romantic ideals of their early phase, mounts up their rage against Thomas for his deviation in the later art songs from his early poems of pity. The young Movement poets commend Auden’s early poem for the parable of pure poetry and aesthetic success and defends his avenging move against Thomas. The introductory poem implies that it is Thomas’s introspective process of individuation and integration, coherence and co-existence, his paradoxical sensibility, his tragi-comic vision of Grecian altruistic art song that guards his sober and benign functioning as an ardent emulator of the pagan altruistic tradition of Hardy, Yeats, Houseman and Blake, as a poet of reconciliation, harmonization and cosmopolitan culture analogous to his functioning in the early poem 18 Poems.

The Free Angela Movement in the United States, 1969–1991

Fifty years have passed since the Angela Davis case. The Free Angela movement stands among the most significant defense campaigns in U.S. history. Even before her arrest on charges of conspiracy, m...

Wanted: Angela Davis and a Jury of Her Peers

In 1972 Angela Davis stood trial on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder before a White jury. A professor of philosophy, a Communist, and a member of the Black Panther Party, she had no reason to believe that any of the jurors were her peers. Yet, after three days of deliberation, they returned a Not Guilty verdict on each of the counts. Through an analysis of the case, this essay argues for a new approach to peerhood that defines it as a combination of (1) demographic similarities to the defendant and (2) a worldview orientation of contestation and anticorruption that emerges from the jury’s function in the trial. Greater clarity on how these factors are important for peerhood provides insights into how jurors can best fulfill their role and what remedies are necessary to achieve a jury of one’s peers.

Report on the Bronx 120 Mass 'Gang' Prosecution

In recent years, takedowns of gangs and crews in New York City have led to mass prosecutions of multiple defendants for conspiracy and RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization Act) conspiracy charges. While the takedowns are generally accompanied by intensive media coverage, information about the charges, process, and allegations against individuals caught up in these takedowns is not readily accessible. This report looks into the court records of the largest of the mass gang prosecutions — the takedown of the Bronx 120 in April of 2016. In the pre-dawn hours of April 27, 2016, nearly 700 officers in riot gear descended upon Eastchester Gardens and the adjoining neighborhood along White Plains Road. The officers were from the NYPD, ATF, DEA, and Homeland Security. Helicopters hovered overhead as armed SWAT teams used battering rams to execute no-knock warrants. They were arresting defendants charged in twin conspiracy indictments. The defendants and the raid have come to be known as the Bronx 120 for the 120 defendants named in the indictments. Preet Bharara, then-United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that the raid was believed to be the “largest gang takedown in New York City history.” The report concludes that nearly half of the 120 individuals targeted in these “gang” indictments were not alleged to be gang members by the prosecution, two-thirds of the defendants were not convicted based on violent conduct (including 35 for who were convicted based on marijuana sales), and two-thirds of defendants had no prior felony record, and nearly half were re-prosecuted for conduct previously adjudicated in state courts. Although many of the defendants were not violent gang members, the vast majority (101 of the 120) were held without the possibility of bail, and 15 of the 19 who were released were subject to house arrest. Further, these mass indictments fail to safeguard the public’s interest in transparency and speedy trial.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Nuremberg

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising at Nuremberg Gabriel N. Finder (bio) The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the prevailing symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Remembrance and commemoration of the revolt are usually associated with memorial days, monuments, museums, history books, novels, and films. But in the first decade and a half after World War II the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising played a role also on another stage—in the courtroom. It figured prominently in the 1951 trial of SS commander Jürgen Stroop in Warsaw, a trial that has been largely forgotten, at least in the West, and in the iconic 1961 Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. But there was an earlier, famous trial whose proceedings invoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—the 1945–46 International Military Tribunal (IMT), or the Nuremberg Trial (or the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial), at which twenty-two of the “major war criminals,” men who had been leading pillars of the Nazi regime, were charged by Allied prosecutors with conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, a new species of criminal offense codified in the IMT’s charter. (Twenty-one defendants actually stood in the dock; one was tried in absentia.) Stroop’s report on the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto played an important role at the IMT. Stroop was the SS-Brigadeführer (major general) who spearheaded the final push by German troops to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto in April and May 1943. (In recognition of his successful campaign to crush the ghetto uprising, Stroop was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer [lieutenant general] in June 1943.) The “Stroop Report” was compiled by Stroop and his adjutant for Stroop’s immediate superior, Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, Higher SS and Police Leader in the so-called General Government or Nazi-occupied Poland, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. With the self-congratulatory and smug inscription “The Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists!” (Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk—in Warschau mehr!) emblazoned across its cover, the report describes the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and suppression of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Historians are divided in their assessment of Allied prosecutors’ representation of the Nazi genocide of the Jews at the Nuremberg Trial. Michael Marrus is the most resolute advocate of the argument that the IMT’s prosecutors and judges were aware of the significance of the trial’s Jewish dimension and that, as a result, the essential elements of the Holocaust [End Page 177] were represented at length at Nuremberg. In this regard, Marrus maintains that the description of Stroop’s report by American prosecutor Major William F. Walsh at the IMT and his reading of sections of it into the court’s record, followed by the projection of dramatic photographs from the album appended to the report in the darkened courtroom, in December 1945, “was almost certainly the most extensive publicity the world had yet received of the 1943 Jewish revolt.”1 I argue, instead, that the world learned more about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the press between April 1943 and December 1945 than it did as a result of Walsh’s presentation. Moreover, as opposed to the German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, which did, indeed, make a deep impression on those who observed the trial and Walsh’s presentation, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising hardly registered either inside or outside the walls of the Nuremberg courtroom. This was a result of the structure of the trial, molded largely by the Americans. The IMT was established and the proceedings in it were conducted jointly by the “Big Four”—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France. But, in many ways, the US was first among equals; its imprint on the IMT’s charter and the prosecution’s strategy was unmistakable. This is especially true of the conspiracy charge. A staple of criminal law in the US, the offense of conspiracy was foreign to the European Allies. Yet, at the insistence of the Americans, it was incorporated into the charter and became a linchpin of the prosecution’s case. The Americans argued that after its rise to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazi regime had been planning a war...

Specters of The Republic: the Case of Manuel Piar

The execution of General Manuel Piar in 1817 is one of the most controversial events in the early years of the Spanish American revolution. Piar, the highest-ranking pardo officer in the insurgent army, was accused of a conspiracy to kill all white criollos, destroy the republican ‘system of equality’, and seise power as a ‘tyrant’. The evidence for the conspiracy charges is widely acknowledged to be flimsy. Prior to the trial Bolívar issued a lengthy invective against Piar. A close reading of that text shows that it draws heavily on the Catiline Conspiracy, one of the best-known conspiracies of antiquity. Behind this historical pastiche, which has gone unnoticed in the substantial literature on the Piar case, we can discern echoes of the conflict between the Haitian Republic under Pétion and the secessionist monarchy under Henri Christophe, a conflict witnessed first-hand by the criollo leadership while living in exile in Haiti. Conjuring Piar as Catilina, Bolívar replaces the voices of writers who on behalf of a ‘tyrant’ claimed a position of blackness and denounced Western civilisation, with images of pillage and demagoguery.

The International Situation in East Asia and the Establishment of a Modern Army and Modern Warfare in Japan: The Memorandum of Takashima Shūhan

Abstract During the Tokugawa bakufu, Japan’s foreign policy was under set conditions, generally known as sakoku, meaning ‘closed country’. However, the existing regime was not fully closed to the outside world. Contact with foreigners in Nagasaki, Tsushima, and Ryūkyū Islands meant that the country was not completely isolated, but rather experienced a situation in which government policy was aimed at achieving strict control over all contact with the outside world, as part of a larger strategy to monopolize all foreign relations. This paper examines the ideas of Takashima Shirōtayu Shūhan (1798–1866), one of the early Japanese reformers, who argued for the modernization of Japan. Beginning in the 1830s, a Nagasaki bakufu official, Takashima Shūhan, began importing flintlock pistols, known as gewehr rifles, from the Netherlands. Additionally, through the Dutch at Dejima, Takashima managed to obtain cannons, field guns, and mortars, in doing so highlighting the importance of the modernization of the artillery forces of the bakufu army. In September 1840, Takashima Shūhan completed his memorandum, which was sent to the bakufu top administers. On 27 June 1841, Takashima was permitted to undertake the first modern Western military demonstration in Tokumarugahara (an area north of the capital city, Edo). He was heavily criticized by many, including bugyō Torii Tadateru, Torii Tadateru 鳥居忠耀 (1796–1873), metsuke 目付 (censor or inspector) and minami machi bugyō 南町奉行 (magistrate of the southern part of Edo) in the bakufu administration, was one of most active figures during the time of the Tenpo reforms, well known for his actions against people who had a strong interest in Western culture and military arts. and was placed under investigation and house arrest on charges of subversion and conspiracy. Takashima’s memorandum requires careful study in order to discover the reasons for the bakufu’s response, which must also include a discussion of the Japanese financial situation at that time.

The “Colored Hero” of Harper's Ferry: John Anthony Copeland and the War against Slavery

John Anthony Copeland was one of five black men who joined John Brown in his famous armed attack at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Despite the numerous studies on Brown and the raid, Copeland has remained an obscure figure, due primarily to a lack of sources. Only a handful of his letters have survived, and contemporary news accounts tended to ignore the five black men. Thus, Steven Lubet faced a daunting task in writing this biography. To understand the brief life and motivations of this young man—Copeland was just twenty-five years old when the state of Virginia executed him on charges of murder and conspiracy to steal slaves—Lubet closely examined the places where Copeland lived and the people that he encountered. Born free in North Carolina in 1834, Copeland moved at the age of nine with his family to Oberlin, Ohio, a well-known abolitionist stronghold. There, he crossed paths with a number of important antislavery individuals connected to the national movement. In 1858, when federal officials began to search aggressively for fugitive slaves in Oberlin, Copeland responded by beating up a deputy federal marshal. Later, when slave hunters captured John Price, a fugitive slave and Oberlin resident, Copeland joined a mob to rescue him. In fact, Copeland stormed a building, with a group of black men, where Price was holed up, and freed him from his captors. Copeland then personally escorted Price to Canada and probably to Chatham, where Brown had recently held his abolition convention.

Conspiracy to corrupt public morals and the ‘unlawful’ status of homosexuality in Britain after 1967

The common law offence of conspiracy to corrupt public morals has a long though controversial history in English law. It was a charge mainly employed against obscenity, procuring prostitution, keeping a disorderly house, public indecency and public mischief. These could be interpreted by the courts as facets of a single offence known as conspiracy to corrupt public morals. The charge was used intermittently in the twentieth century, mainly against the arrangement of prostitution and ‘disorderly houses’ used by homosexual men. It was applied again in 1960 in the Ladies Directory case and was subsequently used against gay men who advertised for friends and partners in the underground magazine International Times (IT). The prosecution of IT was based on the legal principle that certain forms of ‘outrageously immoral’ conduct were in themselves corrupting of public morals, whether such conduct was legal or not. This principle placed male homosexuality in the legal category of ‘unlawful’ or ‘wrongful’ acts. In that sense, even after the decriminalization of homosexuality between men in 1967, it still had an uncertain legal status. Conspiracy to corrupt public morals cast a shadow over early attempts to create a gay civil society that was partly based on magazines and personal advertising. For conservative critics of the 1967 Act, conspiracy charges had the useful effect of curtailing public expressions of homosexuality.

Paper Dragon Thieves

Developments in the law are making the corporate form more opaque and allowing the agents who animate it to escape individual accountability for their actions. The law now provides protection for agents to engage in widespread frauds that inflict massive harm on the public. This article challenges the academic orthodoxy that shareholder and director liability are enough to control agent behavior by developing a paper dragon analogy to focus on the importance of agents in corporate animation. Lack of agent accountability encourages the patterns of fraud that caused the financial crisis in which forty-five percent of the world’s wealth disappeared, and which continue to be repeated. The article reveals how making the corporate form more opaque has led to the destruction of corporate conspiracy charges for individuals and now the implosion of securities law as a method of disciplining agents. The article concludes with a call for both watching the paper dragon and the need to track the dancers who move its feet.