The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670–1789

The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670–1789 PDF

Author: Albert N. Hamscher

Publisher: University of Delaware

Published: 2012-07-13

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 1611493757

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The Royal Financial Administration and the Prosecution of Crime in France, 1670–1789 explores the French monarchy’s role in financing criminal prosecutions in the royal courts of the realm—the payment of criminal frais de justice in the vocabulary of the ancien régime—between 1670 and 1789 (that is, from the codification of criminal judicial procedure in the early period of Louis XIV’s personal rule to the outbreak of the French Revolution). The subject brings together three areas of scholarly inquiry—criminal justice, royal administration, and the management of the crown’s finances. A central goal of the study is to provide factual information and interpretive insights on each of these topics and to explain the relationship of each to the others over a long time period. The book contributes to existing scholarship in four ways. First, although each of the major dimensions of the inquiry—the operation of the criminal justice system, the conduct of the royal administration, and the management of the monarchy’s finances—has a large and increasingly sophisticated historical literature, this is the first study to combine them in a systematic way. Second, the long time period covered in the book not only enables the historian to distinguish gradual from rapid change, but it also allows the reader to view how the system functioned in different historical contexts. Third, the study is based on archival sources throughout France. This comprehensive approach permits the identification of elements of a common experience without sacrificing attention to important aspects of regional diversity. Finally, with respect to the sources themselves, the range is broad, encompassing regulatory acts and decisions of the king’s councils; administrative correspondence at the central, regional, and in some cases local levels; financial accounts and related papers; and court records from the major appellate courts and from several lower courts as well. An appendix of 33 tables lists figures of annual expenditure and other pertinent financial operations for each of the major financial districts of the kingdom.

Too Big to Jail

Too Big to Jail PDF

Author: Brandon L. Garrett

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-11-03

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0674744616

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American courts routinely hand down harsh sentences to individual convicts, but a very different standard of justice applies to corporations. Too Big to Jail takes readers into a complex, compromised world of backroom deals, for an unprecedented look at what happens when criminal charges are brought against a major company in the United States. Federal prosecutors benefit from expansive statutes that allow an entire firm to be held liable for a crime by a single employee. But when prosecutors target the Goliaths of the corporate world, they find themselves at a huge disadvantage. The government that bailed out corporations considered too economically important to fail also negotiates settlements permitting giant firms to avoid the consequences of criminal convictions. Presenting detailed data from more than a decade of federal cases, Brandon Garrett reveals a pattern of negotiation and settlement in which prosecutors demand admissions of wrongdoing, impose penalties, and require structural reforms. However, those reforms are usually vaguely defined. Many companies pay no criminal fine, and even the biggest blockbuster payments are often greatly reduced. While companies must cooperate in the investigations, high-level employees tend to get off scot-free. The practical reality is that when prosecutors face Hydra-headed corporate defendants prepared to spend hundreds of millions on lawyers, such agreements may be the only way to get any result at all. Too Big to Jail describes concrete ways to improve corporate law enforcement by insisting on more stringent prosecution agreements, ongoing judicial review, and greater transparency.

The Terror of Natural Right

The Terror of Natural Right PDF

Author: Dan Edelstein

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0226184404

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Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right, Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

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