This chapter examines laws governing witnesses at trial and their testimony as well as other rules related to legal procedure. It also looks at how these topics figure in a number of psalms and in prophetic literature, since the relationship of individuals and even entire nations to Yahweh is often depicted in legal terms.

The use of expert psychological testimony by the courts involves a series of decisions. The initial decision involves an attorney or judge seeking out an expert to provide testimony. The second set of decisions – usually made by the expert in consultation with the attorney – concerns whether the potential testimony will be helpful or harmful to the case. A third set of decisions – made by the judge in a specific case – concerns the admissibility and scope of expert testimony at trial. If the testimony is admitted at trial, a final decision involves how much or how little weight jurors give the expert testimony while arriving at a verdict. These decisions are strongly shaped by the adversarial system. Drawing on empirical research and their experiences as expert witnesses, the authors explore how these decisions are made. Relevant research is reviewed, particularly on the content and impact of expert psychological testimony. New directions for research are discussed.

Engaging directly with agonistic thought, Chapter 6 asks whether contestation about corporate human rights abuses, over the long-term, shapes democratic institutions more broadly. What is clear in agonistic scholarship is that confrontation must be incorporated or integrated into democratic institutions. This chapter empirically tests this relationship. It finds that contestation improves measures of respect for human rights and civic empowerment. That is, without any formal or informal response, simply speaking out and making abuses known improves respect for human rights, generally. The data also illustrate that, regardless of the outcome, there is a positive cumulative effect of trials over time, demonstrating the importance of reflexive innovation. In contrast, simply engaging in non-judicial remedy alone does not improve respect for human rights. The analysis shows that there is a positive, cumulative relationship between respect for human rights and those non-judicial remedy efforts led by the state. If corporations lead the non-judicial remedy effort, however, they do nothing to improve respect for human rights or more robust civic engagement over the long-term.

This chapter examines how the police and courts became the main audience for competing revolutionary narratives of guilt and victimization. People wanted to punish others and rehabilitate themselves. The courts functioned both as a sounding board for narratives through which one found resonance and affected verdicts and sentencing and also as a transmitter of new narratives to the public, as court verdicts seemed to be the official or “true” story of the revolutions. The transnational comparison of Budapest and Munich shows that the narrative developed in each was quite different and led to differential severity of verdicts and sentencing, with the courts in Hungary being more punitive. This situation in turn further radicalized Hungarians on the Left and the Right in the interwar period, with the “judicial terror” added to the fraught narrative of revolution and counterrevolution. In Bavaria, though memoirs such as Ernst Toller’s sought to rally supporters with examples of legal mistreatment, the revolution did not play as central a role in the symbolic world of Weimar German politics, overshadowed by even limited events such as the January 1919 Spartacus Uprising and the martyrdom during that revolt of the communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.

“Genocide” became an option to codify the Martens Clause when Axis Rule was published in late 1944. But “war crimes,” “crimes against humanity,” and “crimes against peace” were the favored options among Allied authorities in the first half of the 1940s. Genocide’s breakthrough as a politically viable legal concept was dependent less on Lemkin’s well-known energetic advocacy than on its repositioning in a field of conceptual options over which he had no control. Lemkin’s achievement was not to invent a “new word … to denote an old practice in its modern development” but to contrive a conceptual artifice that enabled a new coalition of small states and civil society groups like the WJC to create a new reality by combining the “crippling” and “extermination” of nations after the disappointing outcome of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. In doing so, he introduced definitional instability into the concept. Genocide’s redefinition in the UN Convention negotiated between 1947 and 1948 made the Holocaust the archetype of genocide.

Gender in American puritanism was shaped by both figurative language used in spiritual discourse and opportunities for religious activity afforded to women by puritan theology and congregational church organization. This chapter examines three broad areas in which gender was shaped and debated within American puritanism. The first is spiritual practices, especially as reflected in puritan conversion narratives. Here we see some of the most specifically puritan expressions of gender, which demonstrate a more mobile relationship between femininity and masculinity than stereotypes might suggest. Conversion narratives also constitute an important location for women’s public discourse particular to New England puritanism. The second is trials, the location of some of the best-known dramas of gender conflict that continue to incite and entertain modern audiences. In looking at trials, we get a better sense of how civil and religious law come together in the early New England colonies. We also get a glimpse into how class, race, and ethnicity inflect characterizations of gender. And despite the disciplinary framework, we also see another form of female agency and gender debate. Finally, Anne Bradstreet’s treatment of gendered embodiment provides an example of a woman poet’s participation in debates about gender.

Abduction can be described as the practice of carrying off a woman with the purpose of compelling her to marry a particular man who would then have access to the available dowry of money, land or other property, tied to the woman.Abduction was a noted phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, within the context of the history of marriage in Ireland, reflects the desire, and in some cases the ability, of couples to overcome parental decisions on their marriage partners, but perhaps primarily the desire among individuals and families for property and status that was achievable through marriage.Abduction was most often a crime of considerable terror and violence and it is worth exploring for what it says about marriage strategy, attitudes to marriage, consent, parental authority and property, women’s agency in choosing a marriage partner and the value of women in Irish society. Abduction in Ireland between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries was a common practice.In this chapter we examine the motives behind, and assess reactions, to abductions, including the role of the family and wider community in this often very violent enterprise.

Chapter four turns to the staging of justice, analyzing the design and setup of the post-reform court, the presentation of the monarchy and the principles of modesty and equality in the courtroom, the representation of minorities, and the effects of legal procedures on those present in court. An emphasis is put on the pedagogical message communicated by court performances, a message designed to turn the participants into “morally sound,” law-abiding citizens.

Focusing on the “crisis year” 1879, in which uprisings by Volga Tatars were violently crushed by the Kazan authorities, the final chapter investigates one of the situations in which the existing legal order broke down and gave way to arbitrary rule. The example shows that while the formalized rule of law was influential by the late 1870s, it continued to be challenged by the autocratic order.

Chapter five discusses the ways in which Muslim Tatars and other minorities actively used the circuit courts in civil and criminal cases, arguing that accommodation rather than conflict was the most striking form of interaction.

Following the genocide, the Rwandan government adopted a policy that sought to hold accountable all those suspected of participating in the genocide, including minors. Chapter 5 provides a detailed and comprehensive account of how child perpetrators were dealt with in Rwanda in law, policy and practice. It examines how children were held accountable for participating in the genocide, considering whether they were given differential treatment on grounds of their age (and if so, what the relevant age thresholds were). It considers broadly whether Rwanda complied with international juvenile justice standards, including on the minimum age of criminal responsibility, sanctions, juvenile-specific institutions and procedural guarantees. These issues are explored in the context of arrests and detentions, criminal justice mechanisms (both formal courts and gacaca jurisdictions) and administrative measures taken to address genocidal acts.

This chapter presents the early years of the First Republic through the search for new terms of popular political inclusion and control, and through the internal suspicions and rivalries among the elite. After initial hostility and caution towards the new regime, the borderland population seemed to embrace the new ideology of ‘vigilance’ and the new party youth league, the JRR. Particularly suited to a border location, these modes of vigilance entailed the performance of absolute loyalty, and seemed to manifest the realisation of the state’s official truth, but also permitted some flexibility and protection for local communities by concealing their deviances and contradictions. The state, however, succombed to the ‘politics of gossip’, in which vigilance drove fatal feuds and accusations towards ethnic ideologies and paranoia. Presenting the emergence of the ‘Groupe de Bururi’ as a political faction and the farce of a treason trial that examplified the total subversion of truth among the elite, the chapter observes the drifting ‘zombification’ between an apparently loyal citizenry and the self-obsessed elite, beneath the deceiving truth of vigilance as a new mode of citizenship.

In 1846, Simon Greenleaf wrote a learned tract, “The Testimony of the Evangelists,” that proved the truth of Gospels by applying the rules of evidence that govern common law trials. Greenleaf’s “Testimony” enjoys a lively internet presence among evangelical Christians today, despite Greenleaf’s nearly forgotten status among the legal profession and academics. This chapter describes Greenleaf’s manifold contributions as a founding faculty member of Harvard Law School, a rigorous law teacher, and an influential scholar whose treatise on evidence shaped nineteenth-century law. Historians, however, have mostly ignored Greenleaf’s deep commitment to evangelical Christianity. The oversight is unfortunate because Greenleaf consciously wove his evangelical beliefs into his teachings and writings, including his evidence treatise and his “Testimony,” by drawing from the core principles of the Common Sense Tradition, an evangelical mainstay. It is argued that Greenleaf’s Common Sense assumptions greatly influence current law even if their origins are unrecognized.