Napoleonic Code

Abstract: In 1988, Italy adopted a new Code of Criminal Procedure that was meant to introduce an accusatorial system. This marked a clear departure from the inquisitorial civil law tradition, inherited from the French Napoleonic Code. An accusatorial process does not necessarily imply a full adversarial procedure-trial where the parties determine the issues to be decided and the evidence to be presented. The accusatorial system can be viewed as the one that strictly separates the investigative stage from the trial, so that only the evidence presented in a public hearing granting the right of confrontation may be used as a basis for the judge's decision, while hearsay evidence is strongly restricted. In any case, the 1988 reform was not supported by a corresponding evolution of the legal culture. In 1992 the Constitutional Court issued a series of decisions that invalidated some of the basic provisions that sustained the accusatorial process. The Court held that restrictions and limitations to the duty of the judge to seek the truth were unreasonable and violated the constitutional equality clause. As a consequence, Parliament passed a bill that allowed the substantive use of out-of-court statements of witnesses, taking back the accusatorial choice. The re-establishment of the original system began in 1999, when an amendment to the Constitution was approved that made the right of confrontation mandatory in the criminal trial. In the end (2001) the Code of Criminal Procedure was once again modified, and the principle that evidence should be heard in front of the parties in a public hearing is now in force, with the only exceptions expressly provided for by law. This paper (which was delivered at the conference "Lawyers and Jurists in the 21st Century", St. Louis, Missouri, November 12-13, 2004) goes over the events that took place since the 1988 reform, and explains the structure of the Italian criminal process through the modifications of the past fifteen years.

Abstract: Why did women in France not win the right to vote until 1945, three-quarters of a century after universal male suffrage had been established? The 1789 Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen had aspired to provide the French people with lasting guarantees of their political and civil rights, whilst the constitutional laws of the Third Republic, established in the 1870s, consolidated a regime based on universal suffrage. For the unenfranchised women of France, however, civil rights had barely advanced since the Napoleonic code in 1904. Frenchwomen were not second-class citizens - they were not citizens at all, although this did not prevent Republicans from demanding sacrifices from women. In this fascinating and ground-breaking study, Paul Smith assesses why Frenchwomen were repeatedly refused the rights of citizenship, while their sisters elsewhere were gradually beginning to enjoy those rights. He examines how feminists in France set about staking a claim for the rights of all women to the vote, to their property, and to their bodies, and how they responded to republican and Catholic discourses on gender roles in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, he analyses the political relationships established by French feminists in order to achieve their goal.

Abstract: In May 2018, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights held that Mali’s 2011 Family Code violated women’s and children’s rights. Widespread protests halted the adoption of a more progressive d...