In civil cases, the facts of the case are often decisive. This book provides a comparative analysis of the process of fact-finding in the litigation process. It offers theoretical insights on the distinctive features of the fact-finding arrangements in civil cases in Austria, the Netherlands, and the United States. It also examines the empirical data that sheds light on the operation of procedural rules in legal practice. The book studies specific fact-finding regulations as components of an entire system and places them in a broader context. It analyzes the history of fact-finding arrangements to elucidate the legal tradition that has shaped the mindset of practitioners and legislators. In addition, the relationship between procedural rules and the prevailing constitutional and political theory is discussed. Rules are commonly designed and adopted to promote procedural values, such as efficiency, legitimacy, accuracy, and fairness. Fact-Finding in Civil Litigation discusses the values

This introductory text explores the historical origins of the main legal institutions that came to characterize the Anglo-American legal tradition, and to distinguish it from European legal systems. The book contains both text and extracts from historical sources and literature. The book is published in color, and contains over 250 illustrations, many in color, including medieval illuminated manuscripts, paintings, books and manuscripts, caricatures, and photographs.

Tahiti Nui is an account of the survival of a Polynesian society in the face of successive settlements of missionaries, traders, and administrators. Beginning with the first explorers and Captain Cook's scientific observations at Point Venus, Dr. Newbury has separated the various strands interwoven in the fabric of Tahitian society, tracing their development and showing how they interacted at successive stages. Missionaries and foreign traders, administrators and Polynesians, planters and immigrant Chinese have all contributed to the distinctive flavor of French Polynesia, with Tahiti and Tahitians becoming increasingly dominant, not just as the focus of the French administration in Pape'ete, but in the social networks and trading patterns that have evolved.

European co-operation has resulted in many new and challenging opportunities for legal scholars who, since the so-called 'codification period', have become used to operating in a purely national context. This applies also to scholars in the field of civil procedure, who, for a considerable period of time, have resisted leaving the purely national domain. These scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the question whether or not harmonisation of civil procedural law is a feasible option, and, if so, in what manner harmonisation should be achieved. The contributors to this book seek to further the harmonisation debate by exploring some of the main trends in the development of civil procedural law during the last two centuries in several European countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, England and Wales, The Netherlands and Belgium). Two of the central issues that are addressed by the contributors are the extent to which the various procedural models have influenced each other and the extent to which common traditions in civil procedural law may be distinguished in Europe. Each general chapter in this book is supplemented by three chapters devoted to specific procedural topics: Conciliation, Party Interrogation as Evidence and the Role of the Judge. In addition, extensive bibliographical references are included.

Tracing key biblical topics recurrent in Grotian and Hobbesian discourses on the church-state relationship, The Sovereign and the Prophets examines Spinoza’s Old Testament interpretation in the Theologico-political Treatise and elucidates his effort to establish what Hobbes could not adequately offer to the Dutch: the liberty to philosophize. Fukuoka develops an original method for understanding seventeenth-century biblical arguments as a shared political paradigm. Her in-depth analysis reveals the discourses that converged on the question, ‘Who stands immediately under God to mediate His will to the people?’ This subtly nuanced theme not only linked major theoreticians diachronically—from the Remonstrants such as Grotius to the anti-Hobbesian jurist Ulrik Huber (1636–1694)—but also synchronically built the axis of resonances and dissonances between Leviathan and the Theologico-political Treatise.

This book is part of a new generation of historical research that challenges prevailing arguments for the medical and legal construction of male homosexual identities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. British society could not tolerate the discussion necessary to form medical or legal concepts of 'the homosexual'. The development of masculinity as a social status is examined, for its influence in shaping societal attitudes towards sex and sexuality between men and fostering resistance to any kind of recognition of these phenomena. Imperatives to bolster masculinity as a social status precluded public recognition of the existence of sex and sexuality between men, even in terms that were hostile and pejorative.