Legal Sentences Research Articles

Law and epilepsy. Legal sentences in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1952 and 2000

We searched the internet-based "Juris" database for legal sentences related to epilepsy that were passed in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) between 1952 and 2000. We identified 143 sentences (annual range 0-10, mean 2.9 per annum). Six different types of court were involved (social, civil, administrative, criminal, family, and employment trials). The most judgements were made by social courts (52), and family and employment courts involved the fewest (five). We discuss three important areas of legal dispute in more detail (driving licences, employment law, criminal law). Changes in driving regulations over the years are explored on the basis of eight sentences. Only 30 years ago, patients with epilepsy were not allowed to drive motor vehicles. Now, the judgement on a patient's ability to drive is based on a process which takes account of specific types of epilepsy. Sentences relating to employment law demonstrate that employees will not necessarily be dismissed if they fail to inform their employer of the epilepsy diagnosis. In general, however, employers have the right to enquire about health issues such as epilepsy, and employees are obliged to answer such questions truthfully. An analysis of 13 criminal cases shows that expert witnesses are always called on to comment on a patient's credibility or degree of responsibility.

The 'Bad Mother' in Media and Legal Texts

Mothers who kill or injure their children highlight crucial disjunctions between the status ‘mother’ and the practices and expectations of mothering. Failures of ‘mothering’ reconstruct the meaning of the maternal, while being themselves given meaning by it. Violent mothers may be pathologised and excused, demonised and condemned, but the explanatory narratives that are used draw centrally on notions of the maternal and, more broadly, the feminine. These discourses are reproduced in legal proceedings and sentences, and in the media reports of these proceedings. This paper will analyse the construction of the bad mother in legal proceedings in one prominent recent Victorian case, and in the print media reports of this case.

SENTENCE LIPREADING USING HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL WITH INTEGRATED GRAMMAR

In this paper, we describe a systematic approach to the lipreading of whole sentences. A vocabulary of elementary words is considered. Based on the vocabulary, we define a grammar that generates a set of legal sentences. Our lipreading approach is based on a combination of the grammar with hidden Markov models (HMMs). Two different experiments were conducted. In the first experiment a set of e-mail commands is considered, while the set of sentences in the second experiment is given by all English integer numbers up to one million. Both experiments showed promising results, regarding the difficulty of the considered task.

His Enemy Be Made His Footstool.Visionary Up- rising on an Urban Scene – a Case from Mid-Nineteenth Century Norway

The article focuses on a series of events in the little town Fredrikstad in south-eastern Norway in the year 1852. A small group of proto-methodists, who later on were influenced by Mormonism and emigrated to Utah, made serious efforts to dominate the public urban spheres: the church, the court room, the harbour and the streets. Their actions were, partly, inspired and legitimized by religious visions and hallucinations but their message included both religious and social reformation. They were charged with accusations of blasphemy, crimen laesae majestatis, disturbing public order and insulting His Majesty's servants, and they eventually ended up with legal sentences. One of the rebels, the shipmaster Tobias Jacobsen, was also accused of being insane and made the object of a thorough psychiatric investigation.The author presents four main points of interpretation of these events: 1) The events can be analyzed in terms of "systems in conflict", that is as a confrontation between radically different cultural values and symbols, 2) The conflict had rhetorical implications for both groups of participants: the group in revolt and the established public authority, 3) The rhetorical implications include different conceptions of time and history, and 4) As a contribution to the study of cultural history, a close examination of the visionar-ies' rebellious narratives may show the close interaction between speech and action, event and narrative.

Logical Structure of Contract Law System - For Constructing a Knowledge Base of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods -

In order to construct a deductive legal knowledge base, it is necessary first to clarify the structure of the law as a deductive system from which a legal judgement can be justified as a conclusion of logical deduction together with relevant facts. As the legal state of affairs changes according to the time progress of an event, a clarified logical model of law is necessary to enable us to deduce changes among legal relationships over time from the beginning to the end of a case. This study presents such a model based on Logical Jurisprudence, in which the relationship between legal sentences and the legal meta sentences regulating the validity of legal sentences plays a definitive role. The model is applied to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) to develop a deductive knowledge base. The deductive structure of the contract law is clarified so that appropriate answers are deduced to questions about legal state of affairs at any time point as a results of the application of CISG provisions to a concrete case.

Towards the Systematization of the Japanese Maritime Traffic Law

The existing laws and regulations function as a social engineering system in the vertically-structured society. However it is difficult for nonprofessionals to understand the legal knowledge which has, abstract expressions for provisions, the hierarchy structures of legal systems, the richness of legal text, the deficiency of laws, and so on. In this paper, I discuss, through a jurimetrics approach, the possibility of the systematization of legal knowledge (maritime traffic laws and regulations in Japan; a kind of public law) which is complicated in its structures and nature. Also, I propose, for the purpose of legal norm sentences analysis, the model of legal thoughts and the method of logical formalization using first-order predicate logic.

Shall, Must, May: The Logic of Legal Obligation and Permission

This article seeks to place legal drafting into a structured, logical system. It divides legal sentences into those which confer obligation or permission (called "performatives"), and those which describe obligation or permission (called "deontic declaratives"). It adopts George Coode's views as to the grammatical form of performatives. It then attempts to classify the logical relations between the various types of sentences. The relation holding between deontic declaratives is the traditional relation of "entailment"; the relation holding between performatives is a new relation the author calls "covering". In the case of performatives that impose obligations ("imperatives"), covering relations mirror entailment relations. The situation is more complicated for performatives that grant permission ("permissives"). The author attempts to analyze permissives in terms of providing defences to claims. He finds that covering relations between permissives do not mirror entailment relations. To this, and to confusions between performatives and declaratives, the author attributes various "paradoxes of permission." The author observes that the results of inconsistent drafting are "quandaries" in which a person is both obliged to perform an act and is prohibited from performing it. Despite current trends toward plain language drafting, the author endorses Coode's view that logical analysis is the key to improving legal drafting.

Chapter 10 - WITHDRAWN: Natural Language

This book has been removed at request of the author.

The Organization of the Convict Trade to Maryland: Stevenson, Randolph and Cheston, 1768-1775

T THE shipping of convicts from Great Britain to the American colonies is a significant yet insufficiently examined aspect of eighteenth-century transatlantic trade. Convict transportation, modestly begun in the seventeenth century, was regulated by the parliamentary statute of I7I7 entitled An Act for the further preventing robbery, burglary, and other felonies, and for the more effectual transportation of felons . .. , 1 which overhauled the criminal code and introduced transportation to the American colonies as the legal sentence for the majority of felons convicted of noncapital crimes against property. The act was intended to deter criminals and to supply the colonies with labor. The penalty for returning early from the sentence was death. Minor laws subsequently reinforced this comprehensive measure by creating new felonies, defining more clearly offenses that would lead to transportation, and attempting to remove felons from the country as quickly as possible. Shipments of convicts were organized mainly in London and Bristol by a few merchant firms that specialized in the trade. These contracting merchants were required to provide security for the proper transportation of felons and to obtain arrival certificates from officials of the colony to which the felons were taken. The Transportation Act of I 7 I 7 thus opened the market for convicts on the western shores of the Atlantic.2

Maximum-likelihood syntactic decoding

A model of a linguistic information source is proposed as a grammar that generates a language over some finite alphabet. It is pointed out that grammatical sentences generated by the source grammar contain intrinsic "redundancy" that can be exploited for error-corrections. Symbols occurring in the sentences are composed according to some syntactic rules determined by the source grammar, and hence are different in nature from the lexicographical source symbols assumed in information theory and algebraic coding theory. Almost all programming languages and some simple natural languages can be described by the linguistic source model proposed in this paper. In order to combat excessive errors for very noisy channels, a conventional encoding-decoding scheme that does not utilize the source structure is introduced into the communication system. Decoded strings coming out of the lexicographical decoder may not be grammatical, which indicates that some uncorrected errors still remain in the individual sentences and will be reprocessed by a syntactic decoder that converts ungrammatical strings into legal sentences of the source language by the maximum-likelihood criterion. Thus more errors in the strings coming out of the noisy channel can be corrected by the syntactic decoder using syntactic analysis than the !exicographical decoder is capable of correcting or even of detecting. To design the syntactic decoder we use parsing techniques from the study of compilers and formal languages.

On Lawful Governments

What is the meaning of sentences of the form 'X is the lawful government of the country Y,' and what kinds of statements are normally -made by using them? Most answers these questions can be classified as legalistic, moralistic, or compromise solutions. The gist of the legalistic approach is that the lawful government is that authorized by the positive law of the land. Critics of the legalistic approach point out that disagreement about the lawful government is not always solved when agreement is reached about the positive law of the land. For example, two people may disagree as whether the Colonels' Government is the lawful government of Greece, while being in complete agreement that the post-coup law is the positive law of Greece. From this fact, which indeed should be admitted and explained by any theory on the subject, the moralists conclude that the lawfulness of a government is a matter of morality and not of law. It is determined by moral rules, by personal commitments, etc. Those who favor a compromise solution claim that in certain contexts sentences about lawful governments are used make legal statements, while in other contexts they are used make moral statements or express moral positions or attitudes. In this paper I will first criticize one moralistic solution, that presented by R. M. Hare, and one compromise solution, the one put forward by J. G. Murphy, and then proceed formulate and defend a variant of a legalistic position. Professor Hare' accuses previous writers on the topic of committing the sin of descriptivism. All of them assumed that to explain the meaning of any predicate is give the criteria or conditions which have be satisfied by a subject before this predicate is correctly predicated of it (p. 158). He divides his predecessors into two camps, those who favor non-empirical criteria of lawfulness (e.g., natural law theories, hereditary theories) and those who defend empirical criteria (e.g., might-isright theories, popular sovereignty theories). Non-empirical criteria are rejected because they are too indeterminate and slippery be of any value in settling concrete disputes about the lawfulness of certain governments. Empirical criteria are rejected because they entail a statement of the form 'The lawful government is the government F' (where F is an empirical predicate), which is an analytic statement. For example, some statement like 'The lawful government is the effective government or the government which enjoys popular support' is analytic according these theories. According Hare, however, no statement of the form 'X is the lawful government but is not F' is a contradiction, although some such statements are, perhaps, false. Hare proceeds (pp. 163-64) examine an ascriptive theory which he imputes H. L. A. Hart.2 According this theory, legal sentences are often used make inverted commas state-

Addiction Under the Mental Treatment Act, Eire, 1945

Many writers on the subject of the treatment of addictions have suggested that for treatment to be efficacious, a period of detention legally enforced is necessary, and it is perhaps strange that a country which tends to regard personal failings and idiosyncrasies with a kindly eye has been probably the first to provide a method of enforcing it without recourse to a legal sentence.

Time Served in Prison Compared with Legal Sentence

Time Served in Prison Compared with Legal Sentence