This volume addresses an important historiographical gap by assessing the respective contributions of tradition and foreign influences to the 19th century codification of criminal law. More specifically, it focuses on the extent of French influence – among others – in European and American civil law jurisdictions. In this regard, the book seeks to dispel a number of myths concerning the French model’s actual influence on European and Latin American criminal codes. The impact of the Napoleonic criminal code on other jurisdictions was real, but the scope and extent of its influence were significantly less than has sometimes been claimed. The overemphasis on French influence on other civil law jurisdictions is partly due to a fundamental assumption that modern criminal codes constituted a break with the past. The question as to whether they truly broke with the past or were merely a degree of reform touches on a difficult issue, namely, the dichotomy between tradition and foreign influences in the codification of criminal law. Scholarship has unfairly ignored this important subject, an oversight that this book remedies.

This book is not a handbook of criminology and forensic medicine but rather a tool that reviews socio-historical and scientific data and notes of methodology based on the different sciences aimed at the study of crime in all its many facets (sociology, jurisprudence, criminalistics, psychology, forensic neuroscience, and forensic medicine). The chapters deal with single aspects of the subject, such as juvenile delinquency, fraud, and the relationship between society, individual personality, and sexual criminal behavior. They then go into more detail, analyzing individual aspects of legal medicine in light of the evolution of the discipline between the 20th and 21st centuries, including infant and adult post-mortem examination and genetic DNA identification.

The book deals with two very important but imprecise terms in contemporary law, namely public policy and public morality. It is commendable that such a comprehensive work about general clauses has been prepared. They are the elements of the common good which refers directly to Article 1 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. The aim of these clauses is to protect the integrity of Polish legal order and the reason why they are applied boils down to the public interest. The clauses refer to the extralegal criteria of a moral, economic or political nature. That is why, for a legal practice, it appears vital that experts contribute to the clarification of their content and meaning as a legal categories. No less important is entrusting or leaving this task to the courts and other legal bodies. These efforts serve to ensure necessary flexibility in applying, in particular, the public policy clause – a safety valve of legal order. prof. Franciszek Longchamps de Bérier, Jagiellonian University in Kraków The theme of the volume and the studies included in it are very interesting and important from a cognitive and applied perspective. The authors of the book represent various academic circles and different legal disciplines, whereas their conclusiveness is an essential value of the presented analyses. Dr hab. Krzysztof Motyka, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland The idea of the authors of the book to discuss the issues of “public policy” and “public morality” as legal clauses in Polish law against the background of legal solutions of the European Union and international law deserves recognition. It efficiently combines the findings of the legal doctrine and the judicial decisions which allows to view these problems not only from the theoretical and legal perspective, but also from a practical angle. The presented definitions, theoretical and legal considerations, as well as the rulings regarding the clauses of “public policy” and “public morality” constitute a starting point for the authors to formulate their own arguments and conclusions de lege lata and de lege ferenda. The authors also skillfully describe the afore-mentioned clauses and demonstrate their close relationship with constitutional axiology, emphasizing their limitative nature and homeostatic role. Dr hab. Paweł Cichoń, Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland

Una de las críticas más recurrentes al discurso jurídico español se refiere a su oscuridad e impenetrabilidad. En particular, el uso de la metáfora, entre otras figuras del lenguaje, representa uno de los factores que contribuyen a que el discurso jurídico resulte incomprensible aun para aquellos familiarizados con el mundo del derecho. Esto se debe a que, en muchos casos, se adoptan figuras o ideas propias del derecho estadounidense mediante procedimientos de trasvase, como la traducción literal, que cuando se aplican como misma y única estrategia de traducción conducen a un fracaso comunicacional entre el emisor experto y sus receptores, ya sean legos o miembros de la comunidad jurídica. En relación con la traducción al español de metáforas de sentencias judiciales de EE.UU. que se emplean en la jurisprudencia y la doctrina de la Argentina, consideramos que la reproducción de la misma imagen en la lengua meta (Newmark, 1988) o traducción literal es el procedimiento más utilizado para traducir las metáforas del inglés al español. Es de destacar que no existen trabajos de investigación, en la Argentina o en otro país hispanohablante, cuyo objetivo sea el estudio de este procedimiento de traducción en particular aplicado a la metáfora jurídica. En este trabajo de tesis analizamos las metáforas mencionadas a partir del enfoque lingüístico-cognitivo propuesto por Lakoff y Johnson (1980), abordamos su traducción al español y aportamos evidencia empírica que permite corroborar nuestra hipótesis. Compilamos un corpus de veinte metáforas presentes en sentencias de tribunales de EE.UU. y de textos de jurisprudencia y de doctrina de Argentina que incluyen esas metáforas. Se proce al análisis contrastivo de las metáforas en los textos de partida y sus traducciones en los textos de llegada mediante un modelo que parte de una aproximación translation-oriented (Nord, 1991a) y del examen de los factores extratextuales e intratextuales que propone la autora (1991a) y que han abordado las teorías de análisis del discurso. One of the most frequent criticisms leveled at legal discourse in Spanish is that it is obscure and impenetrable in nature. The use of metaphor, among other figures of speech, is a major contributing factor in making legal discourse incomprehensible even to those familiar with the world of law. The reason for this is that in many cases, legal devices or concepts of American Law are adopted by means of translation methods such as literal translation which, when systematically applied as the only strategy, usually lead to communication failures between expert source text producers and target text receivers, whether laymen or legal professionals. In this thesis, we argue that reproducing the same image in the target language (Newmark, 1988) or literal translation is the most widespread method to translate, from English into Spanish, metaphors in U.S. court opinions that are employed in Argentine court decisions and scholarly texts. It should be noted that previous work, whether from Argentina or other Spanish-speaking countries, has failed to address this method in particular as applied to the translation of legal metaphors. In this study, we analyze the metaphors mentioned above using the cognitive-linguistic approach to metaphor launched by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), discuss their translation into Spanish, and provide empirical evidence to support our claim. We assembled a corpus of twenty metaphors in U.S. court opinions, and of Argentine court decisions and scholarly texts including those metaphors. Using the corpus, we compare the metaphors in the source texts and their translations in the target texts by using a model that is based on (i) a translation-oriented text analysis (Nord, 1991a), and (ii) the assessment of intratextual and extratextual factors proposed by Nord (1991a) and and extratextual factors proposed by Nord (1991a) and addressed by discourse analysis theories.