Volume 3, Issue 1 -

Contemporary constitutional theory remains divided between competing approaches to the interpretation of normative texts: between originalism or original intent, on the one hand, and living constitution approaches, on the other. The purpose of this article is to complicate that problematic dichotomy by showing how cultures having a tradition of prestigious or authoritative texts addressed the problem of literary and legal innovation in antiquity. The study begins with cuneiform law from Mesopotamia and the Hittite Empire, and then shows how ancient Israel’s development of the idea of divine revelation of law creates a cluster of constraints that would be expected to impede legal revision or amendment. The well-known Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, provides a valuable test-case, with its normative statement that God punishes sinners across generations (vicariously extending the punishment due them to three or four generations of their progeny). A series of inner-biblical and post-biblical responses to that rule demonstrates, however, that later writers were able to criticize, challenge, reject, and replace it with the alternative notion of individual accountability. The article will provide a series of close readings of the texts involved, drawing attention to their legal language and hermeneutical strategies. The conclusions stress the remarkable freedom to modify ostensibly normative statements available to ancient judicial interpreters, despite the expected constraints of a formative religious canon attributed to divine revelation.

In order to achieve fundamental results in punishing corruption crime, we should adhere to the legal anti-corruption pattern, advance with the Rule of Law, and make anti-corruption standardized and institutionalized. The bottom line is that we should reform and improve the criminal procedure for corruption crime in China. Problems in the current procedure for corruption crime mainly include: the presumption rules for corruption crime have not been established, the absence of stigma witness exemption system, the witness protection system, the investigation jurisdiction are not perfect, the supervision of investigation is weak, the lack of absentee trial system for corrupt crime, the non-institutionalization of off-site trial, technical investigation measures may be abused, and difficulties in person sought for corruption and asset recovery. To reform and improve the procedure for corruption crime in China, it is suggested that special procedures for corruption crime be set up as appropriate, relevant contents of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) should be reasonably absorbed, and efforts should be made to promote the institutionalization of the reform achievements in criminal procedure of corruption crime.

As majority of criminal cases in the Philippines are often challenged by the plight to obtain voluntary narratives from Children who are in Conflict with the Law (CICL) (National Police Commission, Department of the Interior and Local Government, Republic of the Philippines 2009. Adoption of the police manual on the management of cases of children in conflict with the law (CICL) and the simplified rules in the apprehension and investigation of CICL , Resolution No. 415.), and Forensic Linguistics being a relatively new field in the local setting, it is timely to assess the questioning strategies heavily relied upon by law enforcement officers in the investigative process. However, questioning strategies geared to address purely the investigations of children in conflict with the law has so far been hardly formally investigated. This study was aimed at examining the questioning strategies used in by the authorities in investigating adolescents accused of crime against property . Fifteen transcripts of audio-recorded investigative interviews from selected law enforcement authorities in Manila and Quezon City were analyzed vis-à-vis (Shepherd, Eric. 2007. Investigative interviewing: The conversation management approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press). Forms of Questions and (Gibbons, John. 2003. Forensic Linguistics: An introduction to language in the justice system . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing) Cognitive Interview (CI) frameworks. Based on (Shepherd, Eric. 2007. Investigative interviewing: The conversation management approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press) Shepherd’s framework, results yielded reveal that most officers employed counter-productive questions, i.e. abusive, intimidating, and aggressive techniques to prompt controlled confession from alleged youth offenders. The study also found that the investigative officers did not follow a specific interviewing structure in handling cases of alleged youth offenders. As the use of appropriate questioning techniques have been presented in the study, it is recommended that a pivotal redraft be made in police CICL interviewing manuals.

This paper aims to investigate the distribution of semantic meanings and values of modal verbs in Chinese civil-commercial legislation and its English versions. This is a corpus-based study with two corpora (one is Chinese corpora including 33 Chinese civil-commercial legislative instruments totaling about 343,677 tokens and the other English corpora including 33 corresponding English versions totaling about 254,621 tokens) compiled according to the taxonomic law branches in the People’s Republic of China. The corpus tools, word2vector, AntConc 3.5.7 and SPSS 19.0 , were employed for data filtering and analysis. Results of the study show that deontic modal verbs indicating obligation, permission and prohibition are the most frequently used type of modal verbs and the values of Chinese modal verbs and English modal verbs are significantly different. Moreover, the frequency of modal verbs in both corpora reflects the divergence of context culture between Chinese and English. Additionally, the choice of modal verbs in two corpora demonstrates the negotiability, compromise and humanity of Chinese civil-commercial legislation, which conforms to its interpersonal function. Furthermore, throughout analyzing the examples extracted from two corpora, this study attempts to provide some insights to the modal translation, during which the consistency and equivalence in terms of semantic meanings and modal values are of critical importance in legislative translation.

Victim participation and elaborate outreach programs are becoming increasingly important features of international and hybrid criminal courts. The aspiration is that these programs will increase the local relevance of these courts' work, enhance the sustainability of justice processes after international actors leave, and empower victims en passant. In the last decade, considerable attention and resources have been dedicated to the development of state-of-the-art outreach and participation programs, resulting in exciting new engagement models that are then, on average, evaluated in legal and technical terms. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the more long-term and indirect effects of exposure to certain – unidimensional and hierarchically organized – narratives about justice. In a first step to systematically analyze this question, this article maps the discursive priorities and structure of one of the tribunals (Cambodia) where victim participation and outreach played a central role. The article uses innovative large-n qualitative computational text analysis methods and raises critical questions about (a) the disconnect between prosecutorial prioritization strategies and popular priorities for the justice process, (b) the success of outreach programs in bringing a locally relevant message, and (c) the extent to which outreach and victim participation succeeded in bridging the gap between the work of the ECCC and the realities of people on the ground.

This paper looks at the industrial practice to translate legal intellectual property text such as patents and trademarks in order to examine if there are or there are not special approaches and methods needed to work on these texts and to identify some translation theories to see if these are or are not applicable to intellectual property text. The theories chosen are examples and far from being exhaustive. Intellectual property field is very wide so focusing on Community Trademark would provide a more focused approach. The paper shows that while many of the general applicable approaches/methods are applicable, yet the translation of trademarks deserves to be treated as a field of specialised translation such as medical or legal. The objective is to show that there are certain translation approaches that are useful for the translation of these types of texts rather than for general translation. This study is mainly limited to the translation of Community Trademarks of the European Union and comparisons which can be made with the translation of patents and or other specialised translation.

This article addresses The legal discourse in respect of the status of deserted Jewish Wives- Agunot in light of Halachic-Jewish Law Responsa of Rabbi Yaakov Moshe Toledano [Jewish legal] work Hayam Hagadol (Cairo, 1931) and Bat Ami (Tel Aviv 1947), which belongs to the category of Rabbinic Responsa. From these sources we learn of the legal discourse and his halachic approach in matters related to legal status of deserted Jewish wives (“ Agunot ”). From his responsa we learn of his use of the legal discourse, how he combined fully spelled out words and acronyms in Hebrew, the main language of his writings. He also used Aramaic, and foreign words written in Hebrew letters, as well as technical terms. We learn of his approach after he had meticulously studied halachic problems and issues, and combined halacha with historical events that impacted on the Jews over the centuries. Using these he issued halachic rulings. He used common sense, and did not rule out modern inputs, but rather addressed them and reached a halachic decision in order to provide his petitioners an adequate response. This article examines whether he was a strict rabbinic adjudicator or tended towards leniency.