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History of Some Principles of the German Criminal Law

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:56 PM PDT

Markus D. Dubber, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, has published Ultima Ratio as Caveat Dominus: Legal Principles, Police Maxims, and the Critical Analysis of Law. Here is the abstract.

A comparative and historical analysis of the so-called ultima ratio principle reveals that, despite its Latinate veneer, it is neither ancient nor universal, but a recent addition to the German criminal law canon. Upon further inquiry, ultima ratio also turns out to be ill-defined, undermotivated, and toothless, a fundamental legal principle and distinctive feature of criminal law honored in its ubiquitous breach. In the end, the iron legal principle of ultima ratio may appear more like the flexible police maxim of caveat dominus.

Its frequent invocation suggests the need to reconceive legal science as a critical analysis of law in general, and of law's supposed principles in particular. Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link.

Regulating Sex Workers In Reconstruction New Orleans

Posted: 19 Jul 2013 06:51 PM PDT

Simon Stern of the University of Toronto notes that Elizabeth Parish Smith has published "In a Bar Room Called the 'Fifteen Amendment'": Reconstruction and the Women of New Orleans's Demimonde," 112 South Atlantic Quarterly 473 (2013).

Here is the abstract.

This essay examines the experiences of three women—one Creole, one black, one white—in New Orleans's Reconstruction-era demimonde. Enacted just months after the end of the Civil War and surviving in various forms for fifty-two years, a regulatory system governed the sex trade in this, the largest and most cosmopolitan city of the former Confederacy. Postwar regulation made no racial distinctions among women in the trade, and prostitutes' lives were thus often remarkably similar. Women worked and resided in the same parts of town, even on the same notorious block; faced similarly explosive, dangerous bursts of violence; and exploited the physical intimacy of their work to steal from clients.

In large measure due to their similar legal treatment under regulation, many prostitutes shared W. E. B. Du Bois's common "economic condition and destiny" across racial lines. Nevertheless, Du Bois uses prostitution in Black Reconstruction as a rhetorical device representing capitalism's moral corruption, not as a practice affecting real women's lives. Reading the experiences of three New Orleans prostitutes against the larger racial and economic politics of the period allows us to see how some of the most radical and far-reaching changes of Reconstruction occurred among women living at the law's edges.