Town Courts Research Articles

Buch des Gedächtniβ – najstarsza księga miasta Chojnic (1436–1544). Okoliczności powstania i komentarz kodykologiczny

This article contains an analysis of the codicological context and circumstances surrounding the writing of the oldest city record of Chojnice. This volume is the most important source of information about the town’s medieval history. It is in the State Archive in Bydgoszcz in the section devoted to Documents of Chojnice under signature no. 33. The date of its writing has provoked controversy among scholars, as the date of 1436 was often misread as 1466. The author discusses and analyzes the structure of the volume, the phases of its production, and dates the paper on the basis of an analysis of the dating ofthe water marks. These water marks confirm that volume began to be kept in the 1430s and subsequent pages were sown in as the pages of the manuscript were filled up. It is a typical record of entries kept simultaneously by the council and the town court; it was kept through to the 1640s. The introductory section of the volume is unique. There the councilors present in minute detail the motives behind starting it. They call it a book of memory, one that aims to preserve a memory of official matters, court cases, and transactions entered into. The author also considers the circumstances that could have influenced the late establishment of the record – only in 1436 – and points out the self‑awareness of the members of the town council as guardians of the memory of the town’s history.

Lay Town Court Judges in Nineteenth-Century Finland: The Case of Kuopio and Vaasa

Abstract This article examines lay judges at the town courts of Kuopio and Vaasa during the nineteenth century. Even after the annexation to Russia in 1809, the Finnish judiciary—traditionally lay-dominated—continued functioning largely in the same way as it had during the Swedish period. This meant, among other things, that laymen continued functioning as judges at small town courts. However, especially during the second half of the century, Finnish society changed in many ways. After the Diet began convening again after 1863, many legal reforms were also carried out, paving the way for legal modernization. This article examines Finnish town court judges in the context of the societal and legal changes of the nineteenth century. The backgrounds and careers of lay judges as well as their activities in the town courts are investigated. Finally, the article argues that despite the budding legal modernization and the profound changes that took place in Finnish society, the changes to the judiciary in small towns remained limited. Laymen continued to play an important role in small town courts, and the cases as well as the legal procedure remained simple.

“Unable to Defend Him”: Conflicting Views of Female Violence in Swedish Medieval Law

“Unable to Defend Him”: Conflicting Views of Female Violence in Swedish Medieval Law

Implementation of the Research and Practice Project «Settlement Arrangements in Civil and Administrative Proceedings»

The Russian State University of Justice in 2020 has started the implementation of the Research and Practice Project «Conciliation procedures in civil and administrative proceedings». In 2020–2021 the Project is housed in Podolsk town court of the Moscow Region. The present article provides information on the progress and first results of Project implementation. The article makes an emphasis on practical aspects of the issue. The author analyses and overcomes challenges which occurred during the implementation of the practical part of the Project and mediation procedures on litigation cases.

Dysa , Kateryna Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th–18th Centuries (review)

SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 568 Dysa, Kateryna. Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th–18th Centuries. Central European University Press, Budapest and New York, 2020. x + 254 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00: €65.00: £60.00. Some areas of the Slav world get little attention in English-language witchcraft studies, although publications in Slav languages have increased in quantity and quality since the end of the Communist regimes. We are fortunate then that two new books were published in 2020 which are valuable additions to the existing literature, at least for Russia and Ukraine, and especially for those who have no competence in Slavic languages. The first was the very useful Witchcraft in Russia and Ukraine, 1000–1900: A Sourcebook by Valerie Kivelson and Christine Worobec (Ithaca, NY, 2020). This has now been followed by Kateryna Dysa’s thoughtful and detailed but more narrowly focused book, which we review here, dealing with witchcraft trials in the western part of Ukraine in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kivelson and Worobec’s book presents annotated translations of documents relating to witchcraft legislation, accusations and trials, mostly in Russia ‎ but also containing some Ukrainian material. Kateryna Dysa’s book is more specialized and deals with witchcraft beliefs and trials in Volhynia, Podolia and Ruthenia, three palatinates of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional (largely Catholic but also Uniate, Orthodox, Protestant of several kinds, Jewish, Karaite and Muslim) Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with some material from the (mostly Orthodox) Cossack Hetmanate, in the latter part of the Commonwealth and the early period of its incorporation into the Russian empire. It is based on records, mostly of town courts, of 198 cases, mostly recorded in Polish or Latin. Dysa is concerned less with publishing the texts of trial proceedings (the Ukrainian sources are anyway ‘laconic’ she notes) than with examining the underlying beliefs, social contexts, and legal concepts and procedures in witchcraft cases in her chosen area, which she does well, with plenty of comparative references to Russian and West European literature, and occasional observations when she thinks that Ukrainian evidence may cast doubt on received wisdom about witchcraft and witch trials. The book is strictly about the period and region stated in the title, and only about cases which reached town courts — it does not discuss the punishment of witches at village level for which there may be only anecdotal or folkloric evidence. Chapter one of the book is devoted to the complex legal background. The town courts of the palatinates employed a variety of legal codes, mostly based on the Sachsenspiegel, Magdeburg Law, the Lithuanian Statutes and the Institutio Carolina. Torture and executions are discussed — the relatively low REVIEWS 569 usage of torture is worth noting, as is the fact that most of the accused were town dwellers, with a few peasants; nobles (szlachta — quite a large group) were tried in a separate court. This chapter also examines the role of gossip in accusations and evidence. Most of the accusations were against women, and not infrequently made by women. ChaptertwodiscussesUkrainianOrthodoxdemonologyanditsiconography (with illustrations) and the association of demons with witchcraft. Dysa concentrates on Orthodox demonology but also points out that the mixture of religions and ethnicities in the Polish-Lithanian Commonwealth meant that both in written works and in beliefs there was considerable interpenetration between Catholic and Orthodox culture, also that the Orthodox clergy, though condemning witchcraft, showed relatively little interest in witchcraft from a legal, theological or polemic viewpoint. Chapterthree,‘BeyondtheTrials,ortheAnatomyofWitchcraftAccusations’, deals with the nature of witchcraft accusations in a sequence of summarized trials and incidents interspersed with authorial comment. There follow subtopics : ‘Family and Witchcraft’, presented in much the same way but very informative; ‘Rivalry and Bewitchment’ on accusations of magical cropspoiling and killing of livestock, and the use of witchcraft against business rivals; ‘Dangerous Proximity: Master Servant Relationships’ deals with the use of magic and witchcraft, mostly by servants seeking to harm masters or mistresses or to gain favour with them. Next is ‘Subtle Love Matters’, described as ‘an essential part of the Ukrainian witchcraft trials’. It includes cases of love and anti-love magic but rather surprisingly fails to mention the love and anti-love oral...

Town Courts and Urban Society in Late Medieval England, 1250–1500, ed. Richard Goddard and Teresa Phipps

Town Courts and Urban Society in Late Medieval England, 1250–1500, ed. Richard Goddard and Teresa Phipps

Rendering of Account as a Calculative Practice

The majority of premodern population used debt and credit relationships to take an active part in everyday economic life. A significant archive documenting such relationships is part of the records of the town court in Augsburg. Based on an analysis of these records, read in combination with cross-referenced sources, this article provides empirical evidence of the practices of a premodern credit and debt society. Drawing on these sources the article emphasizes the practices, that essentially constituted premodern credit relationships. Special attention however is paid on a situation in debt and credit relationships: rendering account as a calculative practice. What functions calculative practices took, and how these practices could be investigated further is emphasized.

The Code of Local Laws of the Western Provinces of 1837 as the monument of municipal law of Ukraine

It is established that the Code of Local Laws of the Western Provinces of 1837 (the Code of 1837), the draft of which has beenprepared by the Second Department of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery was to be the codified collection of local law for Kyiv,Volyn and Podil Provinces in the 1830s. However, in 1838 the concept of expanding the all-Russian system of legislation to allprovinces strengthened, so the fully prepared Code of 1837 did not come into force, but it was used as a manual for legal scholars andpractitioners.It is established that the sources for the Code of 1837 were the norms of Ukrainian customary law; privileges, regulations, constitutionsof Lithuanian and Polish law; universals and instructions of the hetmans; nominal and senate decrees of the Russian autho -rities; decrees of judicial practice of Ukrainian state, statutory and town courts. In theoretical and legal comparison with other collectionsof legislative acts of that time, the structure of the Code of 1837 is quite clear and at the same time branched out, namely it consistsof: Introduction; Part I “Laws on estates”; Part II “Civil laws”; Part III “Laws on judicial rites, on court proceedings, and on measuresof civil penalties”; Annexes. Each of the books was divided into sections, subsections, chapters, and paragraphs with footnotes. Legalnorms concerning town (municipal) law were mostly concentrated in Section III (Book I Part I) “On townspeople”, Subsection III(Book II Part I Section II) “On acts of the estate of townspeople” and Section III (Book II Part I) “On special acts of the estate of townspeopleand countrypeople”.It is noted that in the first half of 19th century norms of town law regulated not only the activities of town self-government, butalso determined the rights and duties of a particular townee estate, their belonging to the town community, which were concentrated inthe Code of 1837. Having analyzed the content of the main provisions of the town law of the Code of 1837, it should be noted that acertain number of its paragraphs have a blanket way of formulating. In the Code of 1837, the codifiers technically used the referenceto the articles of the Code of Laws of the Russian Empire of 1832. The peculiarity of the regulations of the Code of 1837 was the establishmentof concepts of citizens of western provinces and of free people as townspeople in its text. An important feature of the provisionsof the Code of 1837 also concerned such a category of townspeople as honorary citizens of the western provinces. The norms ofmunicipal law of the Code of 1837 did not contradict the main source of municipal self-government for Ukrainian towns in the firsthalf of the 19th century, that is the Charter on the Rights and Benefits of the cities of the Russian Empire of 21 April 1785. The Codeof 1837 preserved its practical significance even at the beginning of the 20th century where it came to legal relations having arisenbefore the 1840s, and, accordingly, were subject to the local laws of that time.

Die Gerichtsbarkeit der Prager Altstadt und der vereinten Prager Städte in der Zeit der Jagiellonen (1471–1526)

The purpose of this contribution is to present a research project on the judiciary of the Old Town of Prague and the United Prague towns in the time of the Jagiellons and some of its preliminary results. The main starting‐point as to the investigated sources is represented by sentences and verdicts of the town court of the Old Town of Prague from 1475–1518 and by sentences and verdicts intimated by the town court of the United Prague towns from 1518–1526. The sentences and verdicts passed in those years are found predominantly in the Books of verdicts (libri sententiarum). From the entire number of 1,004 registered sentences in law‐suits, 533 were passed by the town court of the Old Town in 1475–1518, and 471 by the town court of the United Prague towns in 1518–1526. From those 1,004 sentences, 257 (25.6 %) concern criminal cases. Also in the paper, the results of the analysis of the abovementioned criminal cases are presented. The analysis led to the conclusion that the greater part of the criminal agenda of the courts under investigation consisted of criminal acts against life and health and honour. Offences against property occurred only in relatively smaller numbers. Regarding the development of town law it is possible to register during the Jagellonian era a conspicuous improvement concerning the adjucative practice of the court of the Old Town. This improvement was reflected also in a better quality and more refined forms of decisions rendered by the court. Whereas the Old Town law is to be regarded from the point of view of its development as representing at the outset of the Jagellonian era in considerable measure an autochthonous legal system sui generis taking over only in an unsystematic way and ad hoc the norms of the south German and Magdeburg town laws, the first tenth of the epoch in question in the Old Town was characterised by the broad and intense taking over of the conspicuously more developed town law of Brno (Brunn) and of Roman law too. Towards the end of the Jagellonian era, this takeover in the Prague towns was completed not only at the theoretical level, but also in the sphere of legal practice, thereby creating one of the central preconditions for the later codification of the Bohemian town law (1579).

Milites et nobiles: Ormianie a stan szlachecki Królestwa Polskiego i Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego od XIV do XVI wieku

Armenians and Noble Status in Kingdom of Poland and Great Duchy of Lithuania, 14th-16th CenturiesArmenians living in Kingdom of Poland and Great Duchy of Lithuania were mostly burghers, however, cases of social advancement were noted on Ruthenian territory officially belonging to the Crown. Initially, the advancement was possible only for royal court-based Armenian translators, but later also for those with merits for the country’s defence. Another way to advance socially was to marry a Polish nobleman. In such marriages religious differences rarely posed a serious problem; generally, females did not need to convert from their Christian Armenian denomination. Nevertheless, ennoblement was rarely attractive for Polish Armenians at that time; trade and other typically burgher activities brought more profit than the landownership privilege. For this reason ennobled men and their descendants often took on those activities anyway and pleaded their noble status only to escape inconvenient legal consequences or town court. A few Polish noble families of Armenian origin are dated back to that time: the Tyszkiewicz, the Siekierzyński, the Balicki, the Zwartowski, the Sołtanowicz-Chalepski, the Lenkowicz-Ipohorski, the Iwaszkiewicz, the Makarowicz, the Domażyrski, the Pleszkowski.

What Difference Does a Lawyer Make? Impacts of Early Counsel on Misdemeanor Bail Decisions and Outcomes in Rural and Small Town Courts

Recent court decisions and state legislation have highlighted the significance of ensuring that criminal defendants are represented by counsel at their first appearances in court, where judges make critical decisions on pretrial release, bail, and detention. Yet many jurisdictions do not routinely provide counsel to indigent defendants at this stage. We hypothesize that when defendants are represented by counsel at first appearance (CAFA), they are more likely to be released on recognizance, are less likely to have high bail set, and are consequently less likely to be jailed pending disposition. We explore the impact of lawyers’ presence by comparing pretrial decisions and bail outcomes across samples of misdemeanor cases in three rural counties in upstate New York: cases with and without CAFA. We find that these counties saw shifts in decisions or outcomes. We consider the implications of these findings for future research, court practices, and public policy.

Justice in the Florentine Trading Community of Late Medieval Buda

Florentine merchants in some parts of Europe had by the mid-14th century established corporations, known as nazioni, which aimed at providing a jurisdictional and organizational framework for their activity. The consuls of the nazioni often acted as judges or legal representatives of Florentine merchants, mediating between the merchants and the local society. Besides the consuls, merchants living abroad had the possibility to bring their business cases before the guild consuls as well as the Mercanzia, which operated as the supreme commercial court in Florence, or before local authorities, such as the ruler and the town court judges. The paper analyzes various jurisdictional aspects of Florentine merchants’ trade in Buda during the late 14th and early 15th centuries.

A Simplified Judiciary Article for the New York Constitution

This essay suggests adoption of proposed article VI (Judiciary), as the substitute for present article VI (Judiciary) of the New York Constitution. Proposed article VI is needed, because present article VI is verbose, and the present New York court structure is complex. Verbosity: There are 15,397 words in present article VI. The complete United States Constitution has about 7,600 words. Complexity: A “unified court system” (present article VI, section 1(a)) exists, but only in the sense that New York courts are unified bureaucratically through the Office of Court Administration, which oversees court operations. The overseer bureaucracy notwithstanding, New York courts are not unified structurally. There are fifteen courts. Some courts are for the whole of the state, and some courts are for parts of the state. There are several ways to select judges and justices. To cure verbosity, proposed article VI has 4,246 words. That constitutes a reduction of about 70% in the number of words. There are concomitant improvements of constitutional expression and exposition. To cure complexity, proposed article VI should provide for six courts. All the courts, except the Town Courts, should be state-wide courts. There should be but two ways of selecting judges: nomination by a governor, subject to the consent of the Senate, and election. The Office of Court Administration would not be affected by proposed article VI. The names of the major New York courts (Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Court of Appeals) would be retained in proposed article VI, except that the name of the Supreme Court would revert to Supreme Court of Judicature, its original name. Many jurisdictions across the common-law world, New York among them, are served by a Supreme Court or by a Supreme Court of Judicature, the distinctive feature of which is general original jurisdiction. Further, the names of the major New York courts have deep roots in the past. Continuity of nomenclature is an aspect of legitimacy. Other essays about revision of the New York Constitution are: New Preamble and New Bill of Rights Article for the New York Constitution New Suffrage Article for the New York Constitution New Legislature Article for the New York Constitution New Executive Article for the New York Constitution New Officers and Civil Departments Article for the New York Constitution New Local Governments Article for the New York Constitution Eight New Articles for the New York Constitution See Supreme Courts as Courts of General Original Jurisdiction Corpulent Paychecks for New York Judges and Justices

German Law in Medieval Galician Rus' (Rotreussen)

This article focuses on the ius theutonicum Magdeburgense, its meaning and functions, attempting to understand what ius theutonicum meant for contemporaries. It starts with the present interpretation of the term. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the available medieval privileges for Magdeburg law issued for towns in Galician Rus’. The result was not an identification or »reconstruction« of a particular »law« or combination of different »laws« adopted in town courts of Galician Rus’ under the term ius theutonicum. It was rather the recognition that the notion called ius theutonicum in medieval documents was an adaptable pattern applicable to different conditions, a model with many variants or a general set of principles which was filled with real content and adapted to concrete circumstances.

Urban Order and Street Regulation in Seventeenth-Century Sweden

AbstractThis article examines how, in the early modern towns of Stockholm and Åbo, royal interests, town planning, street building and maintenance, and street behavior related to ideas and ideals of urban order. Town laws and ordinances, royal letters and some town court records are employed to tell a story of royal interest in well-ordered, impressive, successful towns; various street plans for the capital and the smaller provincial towns; and the varying execution of renewal plans. It is evident that the capital was to reflect the royal person and the state and that streets and street behaviour were important in this regard. But in towns outside the capital, especially in concrete street maintenance, the centrality of streets does not clearly emerge. The burghers in towns operated as individuals—there was no bottom-up or top-down plan or supervision.

Scottish Portias: Women in the Courts in Mediaeval Scottish Towns

By studying the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century records of several Scottish towns, this paper examines the roles of women in the town courts of mediaeval Scotland. It argues that, although women faced certain legal disadvantages, they were able to make use of the courts to advance their own interests. An examination of the actions of these women shows that the legal restrictions were often flouted in practice, with women arguing their own cases and even occasionally acting as procurators for others. This case study points out the necessity of examining the practical application of the law as well as legal codes and treatises before reaching conclusions about women s status. By showing the active part which women took in the legal life of the town, it also suggests that Scottish urban history needs to take into account women's experiences in reconstructing the life of mediaeval towns.

Relocation mosaic - a review of 40 years of resettlement literature

The debate surrounding what has been termed in the literature as relocation stress, transplantation shock, transfer trauma, and pure relocation effect has fuelled academic interest and research over the last half century. Coffman’s review of both published and unpublished data on 26 groups of relocated individuals highlights the breadth of equivocal evidence of mortality post-relocation. Although his review found no general relocation effect, research on the effects of relocation are still found to be ambiguous and contradictory, and its causative or other link to physical and mental health and mortality measures are unclear. In the United States there have even been legal moves (i.e. O’Bannon v. Town Court Nursing Center, Inc.) to persuade courts that relocation ‘should be a legally recognized phenomenon invoking judicial protection against transfer.’

The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South

When Europeans settled in early South, they quarrelled over many things -- but few imbroglios were so fierce as battles over land. Landowners wrangled bitterly over boundaries with neighbours and contested areas became known as the devil's lane. Violence and bloodshed were but some of consequences to befall those who ventured into these disputed territories. The Devil's Lane highlights important new work on sexuality, race, and gender in South from seventeeth to nineteenth centuries. Contributors explore legal history by examining race, crime and punishment, sex across colour line, and slander. Emerging stars and established scholars such as Peter Wood and Carol Berkin weave together fascinating story of competing agendas and clashing cultures on southern frontier. One chapter focuses on a community's resistance to a hermaphrodite, where town court conducted a series of examinations to determine individual's gender. Other pieces address topics ranging from resistance to sexual exploitation on part of slave women to spousal murders, from interpreting women's expressions of religious ecstasy to a pastor's sermons about depraved sinners and graphic depictions of carnage, all in name of exposing evil, and from a case of infanticide to practice of state-mandated castration. Several of authors pay close attention to social and personal dynamics of interracial women's networks and relationships across place and time. The Devil's Lane illuminates early forms of sexual oppression, inviting comparative questions about authority and violence, social attitudes and sexual tensions, impact of slavery as well as twisted course of race relations among blacks, whites, and Indians. Several scholars look particularly at Gulf South, myopically neglected in traditional literature, and an outstanding feature of this collection. These eighteen original essays reveal why intersection of sex and race marks an essential point of departure for understanding Southern social relations, and a turning point for field of colonial history. The rich, varied, and distinctive experiences showcased in The Devil's Lane provide an extraordinary opportunity for readers interested in women's history, African-American history, southern history, and especially colonial history to explore a wide range of exciting issues.

‘Bringing what people want’: shrine politics among the Agar Dinka

AbstractLarge shrines are built by Dinka in parts of the central southern Sudan. In early 1983, coinciding with the deepening political crisis which led to the current devastating civil war in Sudan, the byre of the divinity Mayual, a shrine of the Agar Dinka of southern Bahr al-Ghazal, was rebuilt by representatives of several subtribes with lands around the town of Rumbek.The byre shrine stood for the community of its rebuilders, a community that recognised the politico-religious centrality of the subclan Panamacot, the senior subclan of a group of religiously powerful subclans known as rordior, the sons women. The senior religious figure from Panamacot was the master of the byre. The master of the byre was also President of Rumbek Town Court, a secular office created by the government. Until his election in 1976 Agar had maintained that the institutions of religious leader and secular court official could not be combined in the same man.In late 1982 and early 1983 the imminent rebuilding of the shrine became the focus of a politico-religious dispute between the master of the byre and a divinely inspired rival from a different subclan. The dispute was a struggle for influence within the rebuilding community. The form and logic of the dispute were in part created by the particular nature of each man's religious abilities, which in turn derived from his possession by particular manifestations of Divinity, manifestations which imaged differing (but not distinct) areas of historically constituted experience and were intrinsic to the creation of that experience. A politico-religious crisis was created by the coming together of people's experience of the activities of different manifestations of Divinity and the differing abilities of each religious leader with experience of daily life, perceptions of the past, and fears about the way national and regional politics were unfolding. The episode demonstrated the way that, among Agar Dinka at least, divinely inspired leadership depends upon an interpretive deal continually negotiated between a leader and his followers, a deal in which all parties are speculating on the future in the light of both the present and the past.

Legislative and Educational Alternatives to a Judicial Remedy for the Transfer Trauma Dilemma

Transfer trauma is alleged to be an increase in morbidity and mortality in institutionally relocated chronically ill elderly. Efforts by the legal profession to persuade courts that transfer trauma should be a legally recognized phenomenon invoking judicial protections against transfer (the "transfer trauma argument") have been unproductive. In O'Bannon v. Town Court Nursing Center, Inc., the United States Supreme Court denied standing to elderly persons claiming a property interest in remaining in alleged substandard facilities. The Court rejected the argument that the possibility of transfer trauma constituted a deprivation of life or liberty that would have required due process protections of notice and hearing. Despite the Court's preclusion of transfer trauma litigation in a constitutional context and the general unwillingness of lower courts to recognize the phenomenon, attorneys continue to burden the judicial system with frivolous transfer trauma arguments. The unfruitful pursuit of a judicial remedy for the ethical and social problems that arise with relocation of the elderly continues, in part, because of a misguided belief that this distressing social phenomenon is best remedied by the courts. Judicial unwillingness to recognize the transfer trauma argument, however, does not preclude legislative consideration of the humanitarian issues concerning the institutional relocation of elderly persons. This Article examines gerontological research in order to understand the judicial rejection of the transfer trauma argument and argues in support of legislative and educational solutions for the ethical and social problems attending transfer.