The recent controversy over Joe Kennedy's annulment gave only a glimpse of American Catholicism's open secret: that contrary to official Catholic doctrine, American churches grant annulments wholesale, freely declaring marriages nonexistent so that one or both partners can remarry in the church. The United States is home to only 6% of the world's Catholics, Robert Vasoli points out, but it now accounts for 75% of all Church annulments, two-thirds of which are granted on ostensibly psychological grounds. The real scandal, though, is not simply the numbers, but that Church marriage courts annul thousands of marriages that are actually valid according to Catholic teaching. Drawing on considerable research, the author details precisely how these courts let divorced Catholics--and many non-Catholics as well--bypass Catholic teaching and law. He shows, for instance, how they often help petitioners manufacture grounds for annulment, which are justified with specious psychological reasoning that are counter to the letter and spirit of canon law. Indeed, it may even be alleged that "lack of emotional maturity" at the time of the wedding can invalidate marriages that have lasted 30 years. The result has been a tidal wave: in 1968, the American church granted fewer than 600 annulments; today it hands out more than 60,000 a year. But Rome has not smiled on the performance of U.S. tribunals: of those psychological annulments appealed to the Roman Rota (the Vatican's highest marriage tribunal), more than 90% are overturned. This revealing look at annulment weaves painstaking analysis with a wealth of evidence as it illuminates the degree to which the U.S. Church has gone its own way since Vatican II on what constitutes valid marriage.

The revised and updated 7th edition of the bestselling guide to easily discovering more about your Scottish ancestry. Scotland has the best-maintained records and facilities of any country in the world for undertaking family research, and now that the National Archives of Scotland are available online they can be consulted by anyone from whatever country. Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors is the National Archives’ official guide and is written in an accessible style from the unique perspective of a custodian of the records. It details all the latest internet developments, including a chapter on family history on the web. It also points to more traditional resources, explaining step by step how to research records of births, marriages and wills. “Excellent help with every phase of genealogical research . . . This book will be a valuable finding aid for many people using the Scottish Record Office, and by no means only for the family historian.” —Books in Scotland “Includes the sort of online sources that have transformed the field since its first publication in 1990, this guide is indispensable for the serious investigator.” —The Scotsman

Available for the first time in a comprehensive English translation, this thoroughly annotated but easy-to-use presentation of the classic 1917 Code of Canon Law by canon and civil lawyer Dr. Edward Peters is destined to become the standard reference work on this milestone of Church law. More than just of historical interest, the 1917 Code is an indispensable tool for understanding the current 1983 Code under which the Roman Catholic Church governs itself. Dr. Peters' faithful translation of the original Latin text of 1917, along with his detailed references to such key canonical works as Canon Law Digest and hundreds of English language doctoral dissertations on canon law produced at the world's great Catholic universities, now allows researchers to access directly this great fountain of ecclesiastical legal science. No student of canon law, and indeed, no one with a need to understand modern Church administration, can afford to be without this important volume.

​This book analyses the legal literacy, knowledge and skills of people in premodern and modernizing Europe. It examines how laymen belonging both to the common people and the elite acquired legal knowledge and skills, how they used these in advocacy and legal writing and how legal literacy became an avenue for social mobility. Taking a comparative approach, contributors consider the historical contexts of England, Finland, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden. This book is divided into two main parts. The first part discusses various groups of legal literates (scriveners, court of appeal judges and advocates) and their different paths to legal literacy from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The second part analyses the rise of the ownership and production of legal literature – especially legal books meant for laymen – as means for acquiring a degree of legal literacy from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Aim of this work is to provide a guidance to lawyers and other professionals to the current contents of EC law related to the legal professions and to the different national systems in order to simplify the use of the relevant EC rules on professional practice in a different member state and to accomplish a precise knowledge of the influence's framework of 'Europe'; in the national regulated legal professions. This work makes a survey on the evolution of EC law focusing on legal profession and their relationships with the market freedoms and competition rules. It starts from the Treaty provisi.