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Author: James Q. Whitman Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300116004 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of “reasonable doubt.” It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one. The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not “reasonable.” Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice.
Author: James Q. Whitman Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300116004 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
To be convicted of a crime in the United States, a person must be proven guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But what is reasonable doubt? Even sophisticated legal experts find this fundamental doctrine difficult to explain. In this accessible book, James Q. Whitman digs deep into the history of the law and discovers that we have lost sight of the original purpose of “reasonable doubt.” It was not originally a legal rule at all, he shows, but a theological one. The rule as we understand it today is intended to protect the accused. But Whitman traces its history back through centuries of Christian theology and common-law history to reveal that the original concern was to protect the souls of jurors. In Christian tradition, a person who experienced doubt yet convicted an innocent defendant was guilty of a mortal sin. Jurors fearful for their own souls were reassured that they were safe, as long as their doubts were not “reasonable.” Today, the old rule of reasonable doubt survives, but it has been turned to different purposes. The result is confusion for jurors, and a serious moral challenge for our system of justice.
Author: Norma Thompson Publisher: Paul Dry Books ISBN: 1589880722 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 247
Book Description
"Part detective story, part social commentary, part intellectual autobiography, part philosophical analysis, this is a jury book unlike any other."—Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law and former Dean, Yale Law School "[Norma Thompson] teaches us, brilliantly and painlessly, why judging, as opposed to simply knowing, is an essential part of a responsible human existence, recounting the trials and crimes and moral dilemmas of antiquity and classical tradition in a stunningly original reading."—Abraham D. Sofaer, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, and former United States District Judge In 2001, Norma Thompson served on the jury in a murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. In Unreasonable Doubt, Thompson dramatically depicts the jury's deliberations, which ended in a deadlock. As foreperson, she pondered the behavior of some of her fellow jurors that led to the trial's termination in a hung jury. Blending personal memoir, social analysis, and literary criticism, she addresses the evasion of judgment she witnessed during deliberations and relates that evasion to contemporary political, social, and legal affairs. She then assembles an imaginary jury of Tocqueville, Plato, and Jane Austen, among others, to show how the writings of these authors can help model responsible habits of deliberation.
Author: Stephen C. Meyer Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0062071491 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 560
Book Description
When Charles Darwin finished The Origin of Species, he thought that he had explained every clue, but one. Though his theory could explain many facts, Darwin knew that there was a significant event in the history of life that his theory did not explain. During this event, the “Cambrian explosion,” many animals suddenly appeared in the fossil record without apparent ancestors in earlier layers of rock. In Darwin’s Doubt, Stephen C. Meyer tells the story of the mystery surrounding this explosion of animal life—a mystery that has intensified, not only because the expected ancestors of these animals have not been found, but because scientists have learned more about what it takes to construct an animal. During the last half century, biologists have come to appreciate the central importance of biological information—stored in DNA and elsewhere in cells—to building animal forms. Expanding on the compelling case he presented in his last book, Signature in the Cell, Meyer argues that the origin of this information, as well as other mysterious features of the Cambrian event, are best explained by intelligent design, rather than purely undirected evolutionary processes.
Author: Naomi Oreskes Publisher: A&C Black ISBN: 1408828774 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 368
Book Description
The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. These scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 068483264X Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
One of America's leading appeal lawyers, Alan Dershowitz was the man chosen to prepare the appeal should O.J. Simpson have been convicted. Now Professor Dershowitz uses this case to examine the larger issues and to identify the social forces - media, money, gender, and race - that shape the criminal-justice system in America today. How could one of the longest trials in the history of America's judicial system produce a verdict after only hours of jury deliberation? Was this really a case of circumstantial evidence?
Author: Barbara J. Shapiro Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520308921 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 384
Book Description
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.
Author: Robert Bruegmann Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226076970 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
As anyone who has flown into Los Angeles at dusk or Houston at midday knows, urban areas today defy traditional notions of what a city is. Our old definitions of urban, suburban, and rural fail to capture the complexity of these vast regions with their superhighways, subdivisions, industrial areas, office parks, and resort areas pushing far out into the countryside. Detractors call it sprawl and assert that it is economically inefficient, socially inequitable, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Robert Bruegmann calls it a logical consequence of economic growth and the democratization of society, with benefits that urban planners have failed to recognize. In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful. The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers a completely new vision of the city and its growth. Bruegmann leads readers to the powerful conclusion that "in its immense complexity and constant change, the city-whether dense and concentrated at its core, looser and more sprawling in suburbia, or in the vast tracts of exurban penumbra that extend dozens, even hundreds, of miles-is the grandest and most marvelous work of mankind." “Largely missing from this debate [over sprawl] has been a sound and reasoned history of this pattern of living. With Robert Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History, we now have one. What a pleasure it is: well-written, accessible and eager to challenge the current cant about sprawl.”—Joel Kotkin, The Wall Street Journal “There are scores of books offering ‘solutions’ to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book.”—Witold Rybczynski, Slate
Author: Amalia D. Kessler Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300198078 Category : Adversary system Languages : en Pages : 462
Book Description
Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The "Natural Elevation" of Equity: Quasi-Inquisitorial Procedure and the Early Nineteenth-Century Resurgence of Equity -- Chapter 2. A Troubled Inheritance: The English Procedural Tradition and Its Lawyer- Driven Reconfiguration in Early Nineteenth-Century New York -- Chapter 3. The Non-Revolutionary Field Code: Democratization, Docket Pressures, and Codification -- Chapter 4. Cultural Foundations of American Adversarialism: Civic Republicanism and the Decline of Equity's Quasi-Inquisitorial Tradition -- Chapter 5. Market Freedom and Adversarial Adjudication: The Nineteenth-Century American Debates over (European) Conciliation Courts and the Problem of Procedural Ordering -- Chapter 6. The Freedmen's Bureau Exception: The Triumph of Due (Adversarial) Process and the Dawn of Jim Crow -- Conclusion. The Question of American Exceptionalism and the Lessons of History -- Appendix. An Overview of the Archives -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Author: Dominic Erdozain Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199844615 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
From Freud to the new atheists, it is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that whole industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, 'The soul of doubt' argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself. The book demonstrates that the radical criticism of philosophers as influential as Spinoza, Voltaire and Ludwig Feuerbach was not the product of science. It emerged from a collision between religious values and religious practices, preeminently acts of persecution. This study offers a bold interpretation of the Enlightenment as a movement of vigorous spirituality, and it turns on its head conventional wisdom about the impact of Darwin and scientific naturalism.0The "nemesis of faith" was not science or secular reason: it was an ethical intuition that a dangerous God cannot be real.
Author: James Q. Whitman
Author: James Q. Whitman
Author: Norma Thompson
Author: Stephen C. Meyer
Author: Naomi Oreskes
Author: Alan M. Dershowitz
Author: Barbara J. Shapiro
Author: Robert Bruegmann
Author: Theodore Frank Thomas Plucknett
Author: Amalia D. Kessler
Author: Dominic Erdozain