Language and the Law

and offer an examination of some of the major political trials of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and postcommunist Russia. Included are an analysis of political trials of the Kruschev and Brezhnev peri-ods, trials for economic crimes and corruption scandals during the transition period and Gorbachev’s early years, the impact of glasnost on political trials, the political rehabilitation of victims of Stalin, and the case against the Communist Party after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This study examines the use of political trials by the South African apartheid regime against its opponents in the 1970s. Tracing the early history of the South African Students Organization and the Black People’s Convention, Lobban argues that the state reacted to the threat posed by the black consciousness movement by launching a trial of ideas, using the Terrorism Act. Analyzing trial transcripts, he explores how the prosecution policy and legal strategy of the state changed during the decade as the nature of the threats it faced altered. He concludes that the political trial was perhaps the only venue where white ideology had to engage directly with black protest. This survey work synthesizes case-study and local-level material on the history of crime and punishment in England and standardizes the debates and issues for the student reader. Historians Briggs and colleagues examine the state’s responses to crimi-nality over 900 years of English history. They argue that notions of control, policing, punishment, and retribution are categories as problematic for historians as “crime” and “criminal” themselves. They analyze the connection between alienation, particularly of the young, and crime rates, and contend that imprisonment has never prevented crime or reformed criminals. They conclude that when English society has not been at ease with itself, it has suffered the ravages of crime. surveys the range of what he describes as German” legal philosophy. He examines critical rationalism, discourse theory, rhetorical theory, sys-tems theory, and institutional legal positivism, and offers biographical information on the principal proponents of each theory and references to relevant Anglo-American literature. He discusses the central premises of each theory, important critiques, and their level of acceptance within German literature. definition. He concludes that what is needed is a postmodem description of the new Europe, characterized by difference, particularity, and justice. sumptuary laws-which regulated conspicuous consumption for dress, ornaments, food, and expenditure for weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage throughout the medieval and early modem Europe-as attempts to stabilize social recognizability in the urban “world of strangers.” He also examines the connection between sumptuary projects and class relations and gender relations and their interac-tion with projects directed at the reform of popular culture. He traces the transforma-tions in which sumptuary regulations were swallowed by dominant discourses of protectionist economic practices. He concludes that sumptuary regulations did not simply die but persist in the modem world dispersed throughout a range of both private and public forms of governance of personal appearance and private consumption. overview of the litigation resulting from the use of Bendectin by pregnant women. compares individual and collective forms of litigation in which widespread to chemicals or drugs results in large numbers of claimants. examines the difficulties, uncertainties, and limitations of the sciences in assessing the toxicity of agents and analyzes the conflicts between scientific and legal “proof” and the concomitant misunderstanding between scientists and lawyers about the role of science in providing evidence in the legal system.