Old rights and new statutes

Since 1967, the UK parliament has abolished or curtailed a number of ancient privileges available to criminal defendants in England and Wales. Double jeopardy is no longer prohibited; unanimous verdicts are not required; the right to remain silent has been…

Mistranslations

Tim Parks, a British novelist living in Italy since 1981, writes about an English translation of an Italian novel: Imagine I am reading a novel for review, something translated from Italian, a language I know well… …“At this point,” I…

Fürstenwahnsinn

The German terms Cäsarenwahn and Cäsarenwahnsinn gained some currency in the second half of the 19th century thanks to a novel by Gustav Freytag, a psychiatric treatise by Friedrich Wiedermeister, and a historical study by Ludwig Quidde. In the last…

A New and Easy Method

Streetwise Professor (Craig Pirrong) explained spoofing on electronic exchanges in this post three years ago. Yesterday, he wrote about the US Department of Justice (DOJ) indicting a group of traders for alleged spoofing. The stunning part of the indictment is…

Toothbrushes in a poem

I’ve linked before to James Wood’s review of Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon. I’m linking to it again for this observation: Sylvia Plath once longed to write a poem that might be roomy enough to include a toothbrush. But…

Shropshire and a bit of Montgomeryshire

Here’s a simplified timeline related to the previous two posts. William Beddoes (1710-1774) bought Cheney Longville in Shropshire in 1745. His first son Thomas (1746-1822) married Priscilla Minton (1754-1819), the daughter of the manor holder in Minton, Church Stretton, Shropshire.…

Resilient gentry

William Francis Minton Beddoes (1858-1928) – whose real estate passed to his nephew, Zanny Minton Beddoes’s grandfather – was listed in the Domesday Book of 1873 as the owner of 769 acres of land yielding a gross rental income of…

A Shropshire genealogy

Poem L in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad begins: Clunton and Clunbury,Clungunford and Clun,Are the quietest placesUnder the sun. In Clun, you can admire the ruins of a 13-th century castle. From Clunbury, there’s only a six-mile, fifteen-minute drive to the…

Scalia’s epistemology 3

It’s hard to argue against Lee Kovarsky‘s position that DNA fingerprinting offers a cognitive method so powerful that no sane person, not even a judge, can honestly ignore all the discoveries made through its application. It’s likewise impossible to accept…

Scalia’s epistemology 2

“How do you know?” and “Can you prove it?” are natural reactions to strong claims and far-fetched conjectures, especially when they are passed as universally acknowledged facts. If I were sure that journalists always followed the same principles guiding fact-gathering…