Legal Inheritance Research Articles

Inheritance, war and antiquarianism

This article concerns the establishment in France of the Lennox-Stuarts/Stewarts of Darnley at the height of the Hundred Years War in the 1420s. In time, they were to become possibly the single most important family involved in the politics and diplomacy of the monarchies and government in the kingdoms of Scotland, France and England during the entire 15th and 16th centuries. This research also concerns a re-evaluation of the works of those 18th- and 19th-century antiquarians who have been the principal authors of this family's Histories, by verifying their interpretations of sources, in particular their manuscript sources in the archives and libraries of all three ancient kingdoms. This is in line with recent reviews of the works of antiquarians of all eras; but the works of the 18th-century antiquarians have been of particular interest. Thus, the history of this family has relied, up until now, entirely on the works of antiquarians which, due to general pejorative views of their publications, have suffered a seeming distrust by modern professional historians. Finally, recent research into the private Stuart archives at the Chateau de La Verrerie demonstrates the rationale and legal mechanisms by which Charles VII intervened in 1437 regarding the inheritance of Sir Alan Stewart of Darnley's seigneuries d'Aubigny et Concressault by his brother John. This document is important, as it set a precedence for later legal inheritance and transfer of the titles of the seigneuries in the family, and ultimately to transferring the lands and title to the Scottish Lennox-Stuarts/Stewarts and their descendents in the 16th century.

Introduction

James Allen Smith Introduction PHILANTHROPIC GIVING, W H IC H IS NOMINALLY AN IND IVIDUAL ’S private decision, is nonetheless intertwined in public policies. This has been the case for millennia. Charitable corporations, trusts, testa­ mentary transfers of property, and regulatory oversight of charities are part of a long legal history. For the Western world, the story begins in antiquity, traversing both early Roman and later Byzantine law. Legal developments accelerated in the late Middle Ages, when last wills and testaments were used to secure property transfers to religious entities and when diverse rights and privileges were bestowed on charitable corporations. Statutes in Elizabethan England, most notably the 1601 Statute of Charitable Uses, sought to reform charitable activity, defin­ ing the acceptable roles for charitable trusts and creating mechanisms for overseeing charitable entities. For Americans this legal history is worth recalling. It reminds us of both continuity and change in the definitions of public benefit. It shows how diverse regulatory regimes have sought to protect charita­ ble gifts from misappropriation and abuse. And it hints at the range of motivations that have shaped gift-giving practices. While this legal inheritance is a venerable one, tax policy has been the principal mechanism for regulating charitable activity in the United States. The charitable deduction has been embedded in the federal tax code since shortly after the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment and the Revenue Act of 1913, which established the income tax. In 1917 legisla­ tion was passed allowing charitable deductions from income; in 1919 estates were also permitted to take charitable deductions. Subsequent tax reforms, especially the Tax Reform Act of 1969, have shaped the regu­ latory regime under which the US charitable sector operates. social research Vol. 80 : No. 2 : Summer 2013 513 The three papers in this section explore public policy and charita­ ble motivations. Two are concerned explicitly with the implications of tax policy, while one examines religious motivations and our traditions of religious freedom. All three papers ask in what ways policies have created incentives for givers to meet the needs of others. Jon Bakija’s economic analysis, like Rob Reich’s, concludes that tax incentives do tend to encourage charitable donations, especially among those with high incomes. Both papers are also concerned with the costs to the state of subsidizing private donations. Bakija focuses on ways to determine the optimal tax subsidy, while Reich moves beyond the questions of how much and how effective the subsidy is to a consid­ eration of how the subsidy can be justified in a democratic society. Reich finds that the m echanism for encouraging charitable contributions—the tax deduction—has a “plutocratic bias.” It is more valuable to those in high-income brackets than to those with less income. Moreover, if the test of charitable giving is providing for the needs of others, the charitable deduction fails to meet that test. Most philanthropy is not targeted to help the needy and is, thus, only mini­ mally redistributive. Concluding that American philanthropy is not necessarily aimed at caring for the needs of strangers, Reich argues that it is “about protecting and promoting a flourishing and pluralistic associational sphere or civil society.” Lew Daly’s paper turns its attention away from economic motiva­ tions to much older religious rationales for charity. Pluralistic religious values, which have come to the fore in recent decades in the United States through various “faith-based” social initiatives, have sometimes been difficult to accommodate with broader policy goals. W hen reli­ gious organizations have received federal funding and participated in the provision of social welfare services, secular aims and religious values have come into conflict. Collaboration between church and state has thus raised new issues of religious freedom. While individual freedom of religion and belief is not challenged, the institutional and collective freedom of religious bodies is at issue when those entities choose to participate in the provision of state-funded social services. 514 social research Daly reminds us that this is “a very new story about very old ideas.” He takes us back to the debates in the aftermath of the French Revolution over the role of religious associations, trade guilds, and other corporate bodies and...

유류분반환청구권의 행사에 관한 법적 쟁점 -대법원 2012. 5. 24 선고 2010다50809 판결을 중심으로-

민법은 유언의 자유를 인정하여 피상속인으로 하여금 자기의 재산을 자기의 의사대로 처분할 수 있는 자유를 인정하면서도, 유언자유의 원칙을 무제한적으로 관철할 경우 발생할 수 있는 여러 가지 폐단을 방지하고자 유류분제도를 규정함으로써 피상속인에 의한 재산처분의 절대적 자유를 제한하고 있다. 이처럼 유언자유의 원칙과 법정상속 간에 존재하는 모순을 해결하고자 도입된 제도가 바로 유류분제도이다. 유류분제도가 유언자유의 원칙과 법정상속제도의 절충안이라고 일컬어지고 있는 것도 이러한 이유에서이다. 근래 선고된 대법원 2012. 5. 24 선고 2010다50809 판결은 유류분반환청구권의 행사방법, 유류분권 내지 유류분반환청구권의 양도, 공동상속인이 아닌 제3자에 대한 유류분반환청구권의 행사 등 주요 법적 쟁점들을 망라하고 있다는 점에서, 학리적(學理的)으로 매우 중요한 의미를 갖는다. 이에 본고(本稿)에서는 이 판결을 소재로하여 유류분반환청구권의 행사에 관한 법적 쟁점들을 검토하였다. Since Civil Law recognizes the freedom of a testament, it recognizes the freedom allowing the decedent to dispose his/her own property at his/her own intention. However, in order to prevent various abuses which may occur when the principle of freedom of testament is carried out unlimited, secured portion system is stipulated. So, absolute freedom of property disposed by the deceased is limited. Likewise, the secured portion system is introduced as the system to resolve the contradiction that exists between principle of freedom of testament and legal inheritance. Since Supreme Court Decision 2010DA50809 delivered on May 24, 2012 includes major legal issues such as how to exercise of claim of return for secured portions, transfer of the secured proportion or the claim of return for secured portions, and exercise of claim of return for secured portions against a third party. So, it has a very important meaning. In this paper, legal issues regarding the exercise of claim of return for secured portions have been reviewed with this decision.

Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic (review)

Reviewed by: Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic Daniel Kilbride (bio) Keywords U.S. Constitution, Law, Common law, English law Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic. By Ellen Holmes Pearson. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. 251. Cloth, $42.50.) Most historians of the early republic are familiar with John Murrin’s image of the Constitution as a roof unsupported by the walls of a national culture. Although opting not to address it directly, Remaking Custom offers a potential qualification to Murrin’s argument. Coming at the familiar subject of the development of a national culture from the unfamiliar terrain of the law, Ellen Holmes Pearson finds early national legal scholars to be experts less at demolition than renovation. Rather than create a legal apparatus ad hoc, they refurbished Americans’ English legal inheritance by republicanizing what they could, jettisoning what they could not save, and building new foundations where the English inheritance was wanting. While neither bold nor particularly ambitious, Remaking Custom is a short, accessible, and suggestive exploration of the intersection of law, nationalism, and identity in the era following Independence. These lawyers, chiefly St. George Tucker, Joseph Story, Tapping Reeve, and James Kent (and numerous lesser figures) were also scholars who penned works that began the process of using the law to fashion [End Page 541] distinctive American identities. Although Pearson maintains that these figures knew of and learned from each other’s work, she provides very little evidence that they actually did so. Instead, Remaking Custom provides a series of close studies of how these thinkers offered their own interpretations of particular problems in the legal culture of the early national United States and particular states and regions within it. Apart from student/teacher or mentor/protégé relationships, there is little sense of whether or how these legists engaged one another’s work. The common starting point for legal theorists in the generation after the Revolution was Blackstone’s Commentaries. Nowhere was this dependence more apparent than in legists’ treatment of the common law, which seemed inapplicable to an enlightened republic. Nevertheless, legal scholars resisted the impulse to jettison it. The common law’s flexibility enabled it to accommodate the new nation’s diverse local cultures, and innovations made to the common law enabled legists to demonstrate superiority of the United States to England. Legal intellectuals rejected the argument that the common law’s legitimacy stemmed from its antiquity. Instead, they maintained that common legal principles emerged from consent and natural principles that all rational people could intuit. In this way, legists helped transition from British to American law while building a foundation on which the nation could begin to elaborate its own legal culture. The written constitution was one key feature of that culture that spoke directly to the new national character that Americans were keen to build. Written constitutions epitomized the engaged, public-spirited citizenry that was the only bulwark against corruption and despotic power. Yet, if American legists found in written constitutions a useful counterpoint to English traditions, in other respects they hesitated to strike out on their own. While rejecting primogeniture and entail as aristocratic features inapplicable to republican polities (and unnecessary, given the availability of cheap land), legists raised few objections to English laws limiting women’s property rights. In fact, Pearson argues flatly that women were “losers” (106) in the transition from British to American legal cultures, since the absence of equity courts in most states deprived women of an alternative to the more unforgiving common law. Nevertheless, legal thinkers’ deference to English precedent in this respect was consistent with their goal of creating a legal culture that expressed national values. Both the innovations they made, and those they opted not to make, [End Page 542] enhanced the nation’s mission of making property ownership accessible to free white men. Slavery embarrassed these thinkers deeply, partly because its presence made it hard to argue American superiority to England. These figures were also convinced that slavery violated the core American principles of equality and liberty. They sought to deflect national guilt by establishing the legal foundation of slavery in the ancient world...

THE IDEA OF RIGHTS IN THE IMPERIAL CRISIS

AbstractThis essay examines the idea of rights advanced by the American colonists in the imperial crisis (1763-1776). It argues that the colonists viewed all English subjects as having the same fundamental rights as individuals everywhere in the empire. These individual rights (to life, liberty, and property) were in turn guaranteed by the right to consent to taxation. In the empire, the colonists insisted, these rights could only be protected by the colonial legislatures as they were not represented in the British Parliament, which in turn meant that the colonies must have the ability to govern themselves in all internal matters, a claim which ultimately led to the idea of each colony as a “free state,” independent of King and Parliament. While the colonists began by defending these rights on the basis of their legal inheritance as Englishmen, they gradually moved towards a more radical claim: that these rights were theirs based on the law of nature, and thus open to all men in principle. This move to natural rights was based in part on the colonial claim that they had migrated to America, a place inhabited by indigenous peoples whom they viewed as “savages” and thus outside of the jurisdiction of the English common law. The radical move to natural rights, however, was in tension with the loose confederation which emerged in the years after 1776 in which each colony was now a quasi-independent republican state and in which the rights of minorities—Native Americans, African Americans, religious dissenters, and Loyalists—could not be effectively protected by the federal government.

Socialism’s Legacy in Contemporary Law and Legal Scholarship: The Case of Hungary

This article considers the legacy of socialism in Hungarian law and legal scholarship. The most important elements of this legacy are: 1. the literal approach of interpretation; 2. the non-recognition of human rights as positive constitutional rights, and their referral exclusively into the realm of natural law; 3. the concept of the supreme body of state power; 4. state administration as synonymous with administration; 5. the independence of family law; and finally 6. the doctrine of social dangerousness. This legacy is partially motivated by the original ideas of Marxism (for example, the independence of family law), but is also, in part, a result of the dictatorial nature of socialism (for example, the prohibition of teleological interpretation). Such traces, in one form or another, can be found in almost all of the formerly socialist states of Europe. Their discovery is, accordingly, relevant not only for Hungary, but also for other Eastern European countries. Furthermore, the revelation of the continued effect of socialist legal inheritance on current, post-socialist law not only satisfies scholarly interest, but also has practical relevance by calling the attention of today’s legislators to the manner in which socialist thought processes and legal views - sometimes - unconsciously continue to influence legal thinking and sometimes even the outcome of cases.

Legal Inheritance in the Republic of Kosovo

Legal inheritance is one of the most important institutions of inheritance law which regulates the process of legal transition of property of the decedent to one or several heirs. The establish-ment of the legal framework has brought about new reforms to the Inheritance Law. This has enabled the enrichment and functio-ning of the law. A particularly important step was taken towards regulation of legal procedures regarding to how courts, other or-gans and other persons should act regarding inheritance issues. Concretization of the legal authorizations of bodies authorized to enforce the procedure of processing hereditary property has estab-lished the legal basis for realization of the iso jure principle, accor-ding to which, at the moment of death of the person, the heirs gain the right of inheritance and the hereditary property is never left without a titleholder. This is a great advantage that we have noted in undertaking this analysis of the norms in this work, because leaving hereditary property for a longer period of time without a titleholder would render the property vulnerable to des-truction, theft and extermination.The goal of this paper is to avoid focusing only on finding the positive sides of the normative regulation of the legal inheritance process, but also in finding practical deficiencies that are weighing down at the moment on this important process in Kosovo, and in proposing measures for overcoming them.The dark side of the legal inheritance process is linked to the inefficiency of courts and the still fragile legal system in Kosovo. By implementing empirical methods, we have come to the con-clusion that the low number of judges in proportion with the huge number of cases has become a key liability for practical implemen-tation of the principle of initiating the legal procedure ex officio. The failure in enforcing this principle and initiating the procedu-res for processing of hereditary property by courts, even though they are obli-gated by law (article 96 of the Non-contentious Procedure Law), has caused a chaotic state in legal proceeding of hereditary property, because many physical persons have died or have been declared dead, while legal procedures for pro-perty proceeding have not been initiated, or even if they have, cases remain pending for years in courts. To overcome this situation, it is imperative to increase the number of judges in a short period of time.

Legal inheritance in the domain of ideal and real

This paper discusses customary and legislative practices and their interrelationship in the contemporary time. Furthermore, the paper will accentuate the relationship of ideal patterns in the legislative and customary practices, in regards toward the real behavior. By doing so, the paper will reveal the possible consequences streaming from attempts to apply the ideal patterns of the customary domain in the juridical practice.

Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction in either English or Spanish to private law in Spanish Latin America from the colonial period to the present. After a brief discussion of pre-Spanish indigenous law, M. C. Mirow organizes the book into three substantial sections that describe private law and legal institutions in the colonial period, the independence era and nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. Each section begins with an introduction to the nature and function of private law during the period and discusses such topics as legal education and lawyers, legal sources, courts, land, inheritance, commercial law, family law, and personal status. Each section also presents themes of special interest during its respective time period, including slavery, Indian status, codification, land reform, and development and globalization. As the first substantive treatment of Latin American law from colonial times to the present, this book establishes a way to define and structure the field. It also underscores the importance of private law and legal institutions in the creation and control of colonies and nations and provides a basis for understanding the place of law in modern political change.

Legal and compulsory inheritance in Vojvodina between two world wars

The paper analyzes dispositive and imperative (compulsory) legal inheritance in the private law in Vojvodina between the two world wars putting a focus on its basic characteristics which had made it quite different from other provincial laws valid at the time. These characteristics were demonstrated in the foundation of legal inheritance in the parental linear system of grouping relatives. Within this system there were limitless possibilities for the testator's relatives to appeal to inheritance, as well as the equality of sexes in inheritance. As for the inheritance of acquired goods it was based on the equality of the male and female lines or a particular hereditary position of the spouse and finally on different arrangements of inheritance depending on whether the issue was inherited goods or acquired goods, which was the most prominent particularity of the Vojvodinian law at the time. Besides, the paper singles out differences which can be seen in connection with legal and imperative inheritance which existed in the private law of Vojvodina between the two world wars in comparison with legal and imperative inheritance which existed in the positive hereditary law of Serbia. The conclusion is that, besides the listed characteristics, some solutions, legal institutions and general cha?racteristics of Vojvodinian law still exist to a certain extent in the current legal heredi?tary system of Serbia.

The Fantasy Men

The remarkable success of the Anglo-American legal system in establishing stable, democratic societies throughout the globe contrasts with the catastrophic failure, over the centuries, of the legal systems of continental Europe. Nevertheless, nationalistic sentiment in South Africa and Scotland reacted to increasing Common Law influence with a paradoxical idealisation of the Civil Law system. The various discourses of europaische Rechtsgeschichte behind the ideology are set in their historical and cultural contexts. The nationalistic discourse of Savigny, which reduced the whole of European legal history to a translatio studii of Roman law from Italy to France to Holland to German apotheosis, gave way in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust to the new discourse of the ius commune, a legal paradigm for a future European Union based not on the historical reality of three centuries of religious, political and juridical conflict, but on a fantasy world of European legal unity from the beginning of the modern period until the 19th century national codifications. This was the post-war narrative of Helmut Coing, which, failing to anticipate the eclipse of the British Empire, steadfastly contrasted the shared legal tradition of continental Europe with the opposing system of the Anglo-American Common Law.With England now in the European Union the discourse has had to be modified. By exaggerating the importance of some minor and longrecognised continental influences on the Common Law, the contemporary discourse of the ius commune europaeum propagated by Reinhard Zimmermann succeeds in trumping the historical fantasy of a uniform continental legal past with the even more remote fantasy of a uniform continental and English legal culture. The old nationalist programme of a return to the 17th–18th century Roman-Dutch law, imbibed by Zimmermann as a law professor in Apartheid South Africa, can thus be presented as an appeal to the pan-European legal inheritance. This discourse currently enjoys great success both as an authentic picture of the European legal past and as an attractive blueprint for the European legal future.

The lost generation: How the government and non-governmental organizations are protecting the rights of orphans in Uganda

Millions of Ugandan children have become orphaned over the last two decades, the primary cause being the increasing HIV/AIDS epidemic. This phenomenon has prompted the government to institute numerous legal reforms. These internal reforms, implemented in a legal environment based on English common law and increasingly, international standards, greatly influence the legal inheritance rights of Ugandan orphans and their chances for prosperity. In many regions, however, the traditional local mores trump both national and global standards, meaning that while Ugandan parents may own appreciable property upon death, their children rarely receive it, but rather fall victim to “property grabbing” or mismanagement by relatives. The key impediments to solving this problem and to Uganda’s adoption of a more egalitarian system of inheritance include the ineffectiveness of local councils, the inadequate enforcement of the Children Stature, and the heavily centralized and cumbersome structure of the national government. Therefore, significant reforms are needed, including the pronouncement of a national policy regarding orphans, the reduction of national reliance on NGOs, and the restoration of a national legislative effort to codify orphans’ property rights.

“By Their Laws Shall Ye Know Them”: Law and Identity in Colonial British America

English law was integral to the foundation of the new polities created in the several colonies of British America. The influence, however, was not simply formal. The English legal inheritance was a principal component in the very identities of the settlers. As such, it was an important factor in everything that they did, from clearing the wilderness to declaring independence.

Neoliberalism, Gender, and Property Rights in Rural Mexico

AbstractThe Mexican Constitution was revised in 1992 to foster privatization of agrarian reform lands. Legal inheritance protections for spouses were removed, and individual title holders (85 percent male) obtained rights to sell land formerly considered family patrimony. State disinvestment contributed to economic crisis in the land-reform sector. This longitudinal study of four communities in northern and central Mexico explores the counterintuitive effects of agrarian law, customary inheritance norms, and women's changing roles in household economies and community sociopolitics on the material and ideological bases for women's entitlement to land. Quantitative and qualitative data show that women's rights to land under customary inheritance norms were upheld locally and that women's control of family land increased along with growing responsibility for production and community activism. Women's property rights were enhanced rather than eroded as families and communities struggled to meet the economic and social challenges posed by the neoliberal agenda.

Orientalism and legal education in the Middle East: reading Frederic Goadby'sIntroduction to the Study of Law

Frederic Goadby'sIntroduction to the Study of Law, written for law students in British occupied Egypt and later Palestine, provides a significant record of colonial attitudes about Western law and the legal cultures encountered in the Middle East. Edward Said'sOrientalismoffers a deconstructive methodology which reveals the legal narrative of Goadby's work as offering an invitation to the students to become spectators, along with the colonists of their own legal culture. Once imbued with the spirit of English law, Egyptian and Palestinian students passed the test of civilisation. Goadby's book reminds us that while colonial occupation of territory may have ceased the impact of cultural occupations continue. For both coloniser and colonised this discourse becomes part of their legal inheritance, which creates much work for contemporary legal scholars.

Kill All the Lawyers?: Shakespeare's Legal Appeal

Two-thirds of Shakespeare's plays have trial scenes, and many deal specifically with lawyers, courts, judges, and points of law. Daniel Kornstein, a practicing attorney, looks at the legal issues and aspects of Shakespeare's plays and finds fascinating parallels with many legal and social questions of the present day. The Elizabethan age was as litigious as our own, and Shakespeare was very familiar with the language and procedures of the courts. Kill All the Lawyers! examines the ways in which Shakespeare used the law for dramatic effect and incorporated the passion for justice into his great tragedies and comedies and considers the modern legal relevance of his work. This is a ground-breaking study in the field of literature and the law, ambitious and suggestive of the value of both our literary and our legal inheritance. Daniel Kornstein was president of the Law and Humanities Institute and is a founding partner of the firm of Kornstein Veisz Wexler & Pollard, LLP in New York City.

The Traditional and Progressive Aspects of Daniel Defoe’s Ideas about Sex, Family, and Marriage

T H E T R A D IT IO N A L AN D P R O G R E S S IV E A S P E C T S O F D A N IE L D E F O E ’ S ID E A S A B O U T S E X , F A M IL Y , AND M A R R IA G E RO BERT JA M E S M ERRETT University of Alberta D e fo e ’s ideas about sex, family, and marriage are interesting for three reasons. Firstly, they are eclectic in important ways: they are practical and theoretical, traditional and progressive. As such, they manifest the extent to which, in the face of complex issues, Defoe’s writing sensitively embodies rhetorical and moral contraries. In their eclecticism, his ideas about sex, family, and marriage indicate a flexibility of thought which seems to defy modem sociological interpretation. Secondly, they evidence the inventive aspects of the didacticism which he employs in his conduct books: they reveal the creative rhetoric with which he incorporates fiction into his non­ fiction. Thirdly, they clarify the relation between his non-fiction and fiction. In that they exemplify the rhetorical use of contraries in the non-fiction, they oblige the recognition that the fiction, far from simply either imitating or subverting the conduct books, elaborates the latter’s moral contraries for complicated rhetorical purposes. Given the state of marriage at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it is hardly surprising that Defoe’s ideas are not straightforward.1 Marriage was in a confused state partly because, as an object of common, equity, civil and canon laws, it was variously regarded as a natural, commercial, legal, or religious phenomenon. Consequently, what marriage was, when and how it came about, how partners were to treat each other, and what the extent of parental authority was were moot points. Such indeterminateness, deriv­ ing much from the conflict between the different jurisdictions, also stemmed from conflicts within jurisdictions. For example, since the ecclesiastical courts were often compelled to annul church marriages for common law reasons, the church had to undermine its own moral authority. Moreover, since divorce in England was impossible outside acts of parliament, even then constituting an annulment rather than a license to remarry, and since forced marriages were common because canon law was not regularly enforced and licenses not uniformly required, it is no surprise that all levels of society resorted to desertion, adultery, and bigamy on account of the problematic gap between the theory and practice of marriage. E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x ii, i , March 1986 According to Lawrence Stone, English society between 1640 and 1800 moved, led by the middle classes, to change the practice of marriage by developing a more personal, emotional sense of marital love and by aban­ doning commercial, patriarchal, and religious concepts of marriage. For Stone, “affective individualism” describes the new secular concern for sexual compatibility, mutual parenting, and the nuclear family. However, Stone’s term does not well apply to Defoe since the latter resisted major aspects of “affective individualism.” 2 He opposed reform which concen­ trated upon practice to the exclusion of theory; he wanted to close the gap between them. He tried to reconcile the various dictates about marriage by emphasizing the primacy of religion. Supportive of the new insistence upon sexual equality and love as prerequisites to marriage, he still employed religious arguments to uphold traditional views about the desirability of the extended family, the procreative imperative of sexual intercourse, and the importance of legal inheritance. He still applied traditional political and biblical imagery to the family to reconcile secular and religious imperatives, to renew them as matters of conscience. The traditional aspects of Defoe’s ideas about sex, family, and marriage are best understood in the context of his personal and institutional sense of religion, in the context of his appreciation of the necessary tension between spiritual and ecclesiastical authority. So, in Conjugal Lewdness; or Matri­ monial Whoredom (1727), despite his dissenting background, the ordinance of the Church of England is...

ADOPTION PRACTICES AND THE PHYSICIAN

In this article adoption is considered in its purely human aspects as it concerns the medical profession. The relation of adoption to legal inheritance is beyond its province. It is generally conceded that there is no social institution that can be regarded as an adequate substitute for the home in the training and socialization of children. There was a time when the inability of parents to support their children was considered a sufficient reason for the placement of the children outside the home. What such a policy would mean during the present crisis of unemployment must be apparent to all. There is a general agreement at present that, in instances in which it is necessary, children are best safeguarded by the conservation of the home through relief or social case work, with the exception of that small minority of instances in which the home is unfit. There are certain children