#Codification of law

[tmarshconnors]

The Napoleonic Code

The Napoleonic Code, also known as the Civil Code of 1804, is one of Napoleon Bonaparte's most significant and enduring legacies. It is a comprehensive system of laws that aimed to reform and standardize the legal framework of France. Before the Napoleonic Code, France's legal system was a patchwork of regional laws, feudal customs, and royal edicts, which created inconsistency and confusion. The code had a profound impact on not only France but also many other countries, serving as a model for modern legal systems around the world.

Key Features of the Napoleonic Code:

Equality Before the Law:

The Napoleonic Code ensured legal equality for all male citizens, meaning that laws would apply equally to everyone, regardless of their birth, class, or wealth. This abolished the feudal privileges that had been enjoyed by the aristocracy under the old regime.

It established the principle that nobles, clergy, and commoners were all subject to the same laws.

Abolition of Feudalism:

The code abolished feudal obligations and privileges, including serfdom and manorial dues, ensuring that people were free from feudal bonds and that property rights were more clearly defined.

Civil Rights and Liberties:

The code affirmed individual rights, such as the right to own property, the freedom of contract, and the right to be free from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.

It supported the idea of religious freedom, although it retained certain restrictions on freedom of the press and political dissent.

Property Rights:

The code placed a strong emphasis on the protection of private property. Property ownership was seen as a fundamental right, and the code established clear guidelines for acquiring, transferring, and inheriting property.

The inheritance laws introduced by the code were particularly significant: they established that property must be divided equally among all heirs (children) upon the death of a property owner, rather than allowing for primogeniture (where the eldest son inherits everything). This was intended to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few families.

Secular Law:

The Napoleonic Code was secular, separating the legal system from the influence of the Catholic Church. It made civil marriage the only legally recognized form of marriage, and divorce was legalized, although with more restrictions than under earlier revolutionary laws.

Family Law and Patriarchy:

The code placed significant emphasis on the family, which Napoleon saw as the foundation of society. It gave fathers considerable authority over their children and wives.

Women were largely subordinate under the code. A wife was legally required to obey her husband, and her ability to manage property or engage in legal contracts was limited without her husband’s permission. Women also had fewer rights in divorce and child custody matters.

Codification and Clarity:

One of the Napoleonic Code’s most revolutionary aspects was its clarity and simplicity. Napoleon sought to replace the confusing and inconsistent legal systems of pre-revolutionary France with a single, coherent, and easily understandable legal framework.

The code is written in clear, accessible language, making it more understandable for the public, rather than being limited to legal professionals.

Merit-Based Society:

By ensuring equality before the law and abolishing hereditary privileges, the Napoleonic Code supported a merit-based society, where individuals could advance based on talent and achievement, rather than birth or status.

Influence of the Napoleonic Code:

The Napoleonic Code had a significant influence not only in France but also abroad. Napoleon implemented it in the territories he conquered, and its principles spread to parts of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and Spain. Over time, many other countries, including those in Latin America and parts of Africa and the Middle East, adopted or adapted aspects of the code into their own legal systems.

Global Legacy:

The Napoleonic Code is widely regarded as one of the most influential legal documents in the world. It served as the basis for civil law systems in many countries, particularly in continental Europe and Latin America.

Its emphasis on equality before the law, property rights, and a secular legal framework has shaped modern legal traditions in many countries. It is still the foundation of civil law in France and has been a model for legal codes around the world, particularly in countries with civil law systems, as opposed to common law systems (like the UK or the US).

The Napoleonic Code was a transformative legal document that codified the principles of the French Revolution—equality before the law, meritocracy, and secular governance—while also promoting a strong, centralized state and patriarchal family structure. Its impact extended far beyond Napoleon's reign, influencing modern legal systems across Europe and beyond, and it remains a foundational element of civil law to this day.

[mihaser]

this year we started studying law of european countries and reading a German Higher Court's decision is like reading a story with plot twist after plot twist on top of another plot twist

[themandylion]

Mores (/ˈmɔːreɪz/, sometimes /ˈmɔːriːz/; from Latin mōrēs [ˈmoːreːs], plural form of singular mōs, meaning "manner, custom, usage, or habit") are social norms that are widely observed within a particular society or culture. Mores determine what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable within any given culture. (Wikipedia)

Just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean it's right.

Look, I'm going to be honest, I don't care whether people feeding other fans' fanfiction into AI is "legal" or "illegal".

What it is, is rude, entitled, and disrespectful of your fellow fans.

[agentfascinateur]

Dear Palestine,

It's important for those able at this time to be dispassionate, to start legislating. Why? So as to not give Israelis an "out", by really inhabiting the public legal sphere and make it a labyrinth that they will lose themselves into while trying to withdraw and try to wash their hands of what they have done.

After the ICJ ruling, I posted here 8 starting points. The important thing is to outlaw Israeli presence on Palestinian soil. But also, there needs to be a price, a liability, for every national cultural treasure, every farm and future losses of revenue, and of course every home - that Israelis destroyed and will have to pay for. Otherwise, the financial aid you'll receive will be international loans that will enslave you.

Palestinian Law benefits from a body of precedents all the way from Roman Law, Ottoman Law to modern day. Use it. Gather your scholars, historians and lawyers and rise. Even prepare to sue the UK for historical reparations.

Throw the book.

- Agent Fascinateur

[theuniversallaws]

Codification

Codification is the process of compiling rules and laws into an orderly, formal code. The code is a systematic compilation of existing laws to be included in a legislative statute. It is a compilation of all the laws in force, including the enacted laws and case law, covering a complete legal system or a specific area. A code can make the formulation of legal principles and rules more concise,…

[fairuzfan]

Leifer’s core justification for refusing to renounce Zionism parades itself as a kind of sober pragmatism, as if an “adult in the room” has faced the facts of Israel’s existence and can finally discipline misguided Jewish anti-Zionists. As he writes, “by 2050, most Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state.” This means, he suggests, American Jews must contend with a future where “Jewish existence” will be “increasingly dominated by Israel as the author of the collective Jewish fate.” And, he argues, this apparently neutral fact necessitates American Jewish allegiance—albeit, qualified—with the Israeli nation-state. “The locus of the Jewish people’s historical drama is now there, in Israel, whether we like it or not,” he asserts. An apparently incontrovertible future where the “Israeli Jew, raised to live by the sword, his Jewishness taken for granted, will become the norm” is something American Jews must simply resign themselves to. He even goes as far as to state that Israel’s forthcoming eclipse of the diaspora as home to a majority of the world’s Jews means that “there can no longer be a meaningfully autonomous Jewish politics outside of [Israel].” Despite Leifer’s breezy, matter-of-fact tone, there are a number of disturbing implications about this assertion of Israel’s “demographic reality.” That Israel has “become the homeland of the majority of the world’s Jews,” (soon-to-outpace even the US Jewish population) has not simply just “emerg[ed].” Rather, it has been catastrophically produced through the relentless slaughter, displacement, and dehumanization of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and made possible by shoehorning a once definitionally diasporic Judaism into a ghastly experiment in settler colonialism. In other words, Leifer’s demography-as-destiny analysis willfully obscures the ongoing colonial violence, racial segregation, and aggressive land theft that makes the growth of Israel’s Jewish population possible. Indeed, Leifer’s analysis is perhaps better understood as a form of demography-as-race-science: by spuriously presenting Israel’s emergence as “the global Jewish center of gravity” as a spontaneous process divorced from Israel’s history of Palestinian dispossession and occupation, Leifer helps legitimize and depoliticize an ethnonationalist project premised, as Fayez Sayegh identified in 1965, on “statehood in all of Palestine…completely emptied of its Arabs.”10 One might expect a self-proclaimed “anti-occupation Jew” to consider such matters in an argument directly related to questions of Israel’s “demographic reality.”11 Yet Leifer’s discussion of Israel’s population dominance omits any consideration of Palestinians whatsoever. As a result, he shrouds his discussion of Israeli Jewish population growth in a false sense of politically neutral inexorability, while willfully enabling the ongoing suppression of Palestinian history and experience under Zionist colonialism. Indeed, Leifer’s vision of Palestinians’ role in Israel’s “demographic reality” as homeland to a majority of the world’s Jews is unclear—a glaring oversight for an author who purportedly detests Israel’s racist and eliminatory stance towards Palestinians. For example, nowhere in his discussion of Israel’s growing Jewish population does Leifer mention or endorse the Palestinian right to return—a right that Israel still denies Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba in open violation of international law. Nor does he discuss the repeal of Israel’s heinous Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018, which, as Lana Tatour argues, “simply affirms reality” in its codification of the Jewish supremacy, apartheid governance, and ongoing occupation that had long constituted Palestinians’ lived reality in a “Jewish State.”12 No matter Leifer’s stated convictions, his consciously decontextualized and statistical appeal to Israel’s impending Jewish majority can only be read as a callous whitewashing of Zionism’s colonial origins and a tacit endorsement of Israel’s ongoing fascistic debasement of Palestinian life.

—"Acting Jewishly During a Genocide: On Joshua Leifer’s Tablets Shattered" by Charlotte Rosen

[azspot]

Florida’s new law effectively criminalizing homelessness, which took effect on October 1, is a malicious legal codification of a cruel and dehumanizing approach to a wildly complex, multifaceted societal problem that plagues the nation.

Rather than meeting the issue where the ‘rubber meets the road,’ so to speak, and addressing the root causes of homelessness, the state of Florida has presented an immoral and draconian measure that punishes the unhoused for their family and economic circumstances, exacerbating their embarrassment and suffering. The law, championed by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, is part of a nasty right-wing agenda seeking to consistently scapegoat, penalize poverty and marginalize vulnerable populations.

[mariacallous]

I'm tired of the "Roe should have been codified years ago!" argument as well as the "Democrats could have codified Roe but didn't!" argument.

Codification would not have prevented SCOTUS from doing what it did in Dobbs. SCOTUS has the constitutionally-granted authority to review laws and determine their constitutionality. Lawsuits would have been filed JUST LIKE THEY WERE LEADING UP TO DOBBS challenging the constitutionality of the law JUST LIKE THEY DID WITH THE ACA AND MANY OTHER EXAMPLES.

And the Democrats have literally never had the votes to codify. Maybe the Republicans should have stopped using their agency to be fucking awful but that one doesn't come up very much.

The key factor is the right-wing capture of the court after 2016 - once Trump became President, it was simply a matter of time before enough justices would be appointed to overturn.

[max1461]

Two takes I see that don't make much sense are as follows:

From SWERFs, "sex work is exploitative to women, therefore it should be illegal".

From pro-lifers, "abortion is exploitative to women, therefore it should be illegal".

Never mind that the pro-life argument which says that abortion is exploitative to women doesn't make sense on its own. The more essential point is: if some group is being exploited by a given practice, you want to solve that by criminalizing the activities of the exploited party? That just seems odd; it's unclear how that is supposed to help. "Sorry, we're here to arrest you for getting exploited". What is the logic here?

For my own part, I think that sex work probably is exploitative most of the time, but I can't imagine that making it illegal and forcing it underground helps much with this. Sex work is still widely practiced even in places where it isn't legal, this much is obvious enough, and the illegality impedes effective strategies of combating exploitation such as unionization, which is an imperfect but extremely powerful tool, tried and true in a wide variety of industries.

I know that SWERFs resist comparisons of sex work to other industries, but their arguments mostly seem to focus on the idea that sex work is uniquely harmful to practitioners and never really seem to answer the substantive question of why the tools developed to combat exploitation in other industries should not be expected to be useful also to the sex worker. I think this is because they are guided by this feeling that all discussion of mitigating exploitation is small potatoes, since sex work is so harmful that it should not exist at all. But even if this is true, that is clearly not a feasible situation to bring about via criminalization, as the widespread practice of sex work even where it is illegal should make obvious! It's like these people are more interested in officially registering their viewpoint that "sex work should not exist" (giving it legal codification and therefore legitimacy) than they are in actually reducing real exploitation in the real world. For a comparison: I think heroin addiction should not exist, but I do not think that throwing heroin users in jail is probably the best way to achieve this, nor do I think that it constitutes particularly just treatment of said heroin users!

I guess this is the same conversation that the left has been having with the right about drug decriminalization and harm reduction for many years. You need to make an argument better than "this thing is bad, therefore it should be illegal". That's like, a child's understanding of how the law should work, it's more complicated than that.

Now I will say that I know that there exist people out there who do sex work and enjoy it, and do not consider themselves exploited, just as there exist drug users (although probably not heroin users) who enjoy it and either are not addicted or are addicted but view this as an acceptable trade-off. To these people I say that I do not have any interest in telling you how to run your lives, and if you genuinely do these things voluntarily I think that is fine and good. You are also my allies on this front. I think that very probably the majority of sex workers are exploited, and very probably the majority of hard drug users are trapped in a vicious cycle that they would be better off escaping from, and in policy discussions around these issues I think these concerns should take highest priority. Still, though, if you just have some deep passion for fucking people for money or whatever, a priori I desire a world in which you can do that; my discussion of sex work as something to which harm reduction is a reasonable sociopolitical approach should not be construed as opposition to your ends.

[shamandrummer]

What Shamanism Is Not

When people ask me if I can define what shamanism is, I like to begin by defining what it isn't. Sometimes it is easier to contrast something with what it is not than to define exactly what it is. So in that vein, shamanism is not:

Religion. It is important to highlight that shamanism is not a religion, which involves a set of organized beliefs, practices, and systems that most often relate to the belief and worship of a controlling force, such as a personal god or another supernatural being. In an organized religion, belief systems and rituals are systematically arranged and formally established, typically by an official doctrine (or dogma), a hierarchical or bureaucratic leadership structure, and a codification of proper and improper behavior. Unlike religion, shamanism has no dogma, no religious hierarchy, and is a cross-cultural tradition characterized by direct revelation and hands on experience. Shamanism is based on the principle that innate wisdom and guidance can be accessed through the inner senses in ecstatic trance. No intermediary such as the church or priesthood is needed to access personal revelation and spiritual experience. The essence of shamanism is the experience of direct revelation from within. Shamanism is about remembering, exploring, and developing the true self. Shamanism places emphasis on the individual, of breaking free and discovering your own uniqueness in order to bring something new back to the group.

Psychology. Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior. Psychologists endeavor to understand the motivations and intentions inherent within a person's mental and emotional behaviors. It does so by uncovering the hidden agendas and issues at play in a persons actions and choices. Shamanism acknowledges the value of the psychological perspective, however, it does not seek to understand a person's underlying issues and intentions. That is best left to trained psychologists. Indeed, from the shamanic perspective--which is to say a soul-centered perspective, rather than a mental perspective--it is understood that the inner state of the soul is expressed as thoughts, feelings and emotions in the outer, physical realm. The mental and emotional conditions are but the symptoms or manifestation of the inner state of the soul. Shamanism is a paradigm of self-empowerment, which enables people to engage the soul in ways that foster its growth and evolution.

Metaphysics. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being. The perspective of metaphysics is that everything has a function or purpose and its essential nature is to grow and achieve its purpose. It explores abstract concepts such as cause and effect (karma), the nature of time, the existence of God, the meaning of life, the relationship between mind and body, and the existence of free will. Unlike metaphysics, shamanism is based in personal accountability without the imposition of an all-powerful God or theoretical universal laws that dictate the circumstances of our lives. Shamanism is premised on spiritual sovereignty free of karmic reward and punishment. When presented with a situation, shamanism never endeavors to find what the lesson is, understand its purpose, or comprehend the meaning. Instead, practitioners seek to apply their knowledge and skills to resolve the situation. Practitioners employ time-tested methods for altering consciousness to find clarity and solve problems.

What Shamanism Is

Shamanism is a cross-cultural, spiritual path practiced in every continent of the world. It is the most ancient and most enduring spiritual tradition known to humanity. It predates and constitutes the foundation of all known religions, psychologies and philosophies. It originated among nomadic hunting and gathering societies. These ancient shamanic ways have withstood the tests of time, varying little from culture to culture. Over thousands of years of trial and error, primal peoples the world over developed the same basic principles and techniques of shamanic power and healing.

Shamanism represents a universal conceptual framework found among Indigenous tribal humans. It includes the belief that the natural world has two aspects: ordinary everyday awareness, formed by our habitual behaviors, patterns of belief, social norms, and cultural conditioning, and a second non-ordinary awareness accessed through altered states, or ecstatic trance, induced by shamanic practices such as repetitive drumming. The act of entering an ecstatic trance state is called the soul flight or shamanic journey, and it allows the journeyer to view life and life's problems from a detached, spiritual perspective, not easily achieved in a state of ordinary consciousness.

The shamanic practitioner traverses the inner realms in order to mediate between the needs of the spirit world and those of the material world. It is an inward spiritual journey of rapture in which the practitioner interacts with the inner spirit world, thereby influencing the outer material world. From a shamanic perspective, all human experience is self-generated. Experience is shaped from within since the inner world is a microcosm of the outer world. Each human being is a hologram of the universe. Essentially, we are the universe experiencing itself in human form.

[hyperlexichypatia]

Please explain the relationship between HIPAA and second wave feminists being ok with calling adults girl

Okay, but you must understand that this is truly my most unhingéd, crack-est opinion that I would generally reserve for High Rambling. If I were a vlogger, I would be saying it in my car. I do not have "evidence" or "logic" or "a coherent argument." You cannot hold this against my actual thoughtful arguments that I promise I also have, because this is not one. But. Okay. If you still want to read my unhingéd crack. Here goes.

So, for most of the 20th century, it was colloquially common to call adult women "girls," and this was part of a pattern of women being infantilized and treated as children, and a big part of second-wave feminism in the 1970s was pushing back on that infantilization, including insisting that adult women be called "women" instead of "girls." Right? Right. But then by the 1990s/2000s, many of those same feminists were openly calling women "girls" and using infantilizing language (like dismissing women voters as "girls trying to impress boys"). What changed?

Now obviously the most obvious explanation, and undoubtedly biggest factor, in this shift is just the passage of time and ageing. The older people get, in general, the more they tend to infantalize younger people. Somebody in their 20s in the '70s would be in their 50s by the '00s. They might have grown children of their own. This is the logical explanation. Okay.

But also...

Until the 1990s, the status of patients' rights to medical privacy, autonomy, and decision-making in general was, well, abysmal. A lot of people who grew up in the post-HIPAA era don't realize the extent of it -- they think the laws around medical privacy were just codification of what was already an established cultural and ethical norm. And of course it was worse for women, people of color, disabled people, poor people, queer people, etc, but honestly, even for a straight white abled middle-class man, it wasn't that great. Doctors would tell patients' families a patient's diagnosis and tell them to lie to the patient about it! Doctors would go around in public talking about Mrs. Smith's gallstones! There were some ethical guidelines around privacy, but patients had no real recourse to enforce them.

'70s feminists somewhat supported medical freedom and privacy as part of women's rights -- like, they opposed the common practice of doctors bringing a woman in for a biopsy and just scooping out some organs while you're in there -- but they also weren't especially pro-privacy or pro-autonomy in general, and were generally sex-negative, transphobic, etc. We know this.

When patients' right to privacy became legally codified (HIPAA being the most prominent example), privacy rights were primarily defined based on age. Thus why "parents rights" advocates were outraged! That minors could have privacy rights for reproductive healthcare (but depending on the state, not for any other kind of healthcare!). See, prior to that time, "adulthood" as a status didn't necessarily confer a medical right to privacy.

(I'm actually working on writing something longer with actual thought and evidence and logic about the social construction of the "age of majority" and how it's not necessarily meaningful to talk about different times/contexts having a "higher" or "lower" age of majority without unpacking what that meant at that time... but this is not that. This is unhinged crack.)

And... around that time... you just... quietly... heard less and less about "Don't call adult women 'girls'" and more about "Influences on Our Girls."

So I guess the actual grain of theory behind my rambling, if directly stated, would be: As "adulthood" became ontologically defined as conferring an individual right to medical privacy, the authoritarian wings of the feminist movement quietly rescinded the claim that women are "adults."

I guess I could've framed this around Lawrence v Texas and sexual autonomy rather than medical privacy, but I happened to be thinking about HIPAA at the time.

Anyway, bet you're sorry you asked, huh?

[octavianacidicbreastmilk]

and then this is the question? like sorry to be obtuse myself but if we go by the path of least resistance and assume a regular medieval legal system they would just be hyperspecific legal norms that are tied to the minor house/territory that would almost never be relevant in a storytelling setting. but what is brandybottoms statute we wonder 🤪

some ppl criticising asoiaf can be so very obtuse tbh. and it always happen in conjunction with bringing up that stupid aragorn's tax policy comment. like first of all this a story that by definition of being such has a narrow scope of interest and is Not a real world and it would be unreasonable for one human being to handle all the possible facets of creating a seemingly realistic society. are we gonna question if grrm addressed plumbing and water infrastructure next 🤪

[piratesexmachine420]

Okay one more complaint about other people's posts before I go back to obtuse technical nonsense.

If I see another person repost this (↓) tweet, I am going to start killing.

Believe it or not, but the flag code actually does specify where the stars and stripes go. This isn't the fucking 1700s anymore.

If this post's author had bothered to actually read chapter 1, section 5 of 4 U.S. Code (Display and use of flag by civilians; codification of rules and customs; definition), they would find that the flag is defined not simply by section 1 ("The flag of the United States shall be thirteen horizontal stripes, alternate red and white; and the union of the flag shall be forty-eight stars, white in a blue field.") and section 2 ("On the admission of a new State into the Union one star shall be added to the union of the flag; and such addition shall take effect on the fourth day of July then next succeeding such admission.") but also by Executive order 10834 ("[...] The flag of the United States for the purpose of this chapter shall be defined according to sections 1 and 2 of this title and Executive Order 10834 issued pursuant thereto.").

Ex. Ord. 10834 clearly lays out the shape and dimensions of the flag in its attachment. ("Sec. 2. The positions of the stars in the union of the flag and in the union jack shall be as indicated on the attachment to this order, which is hereby made a part of this order.", "Sec. 3. The dimensions of the constituent parts of the flag shall conform to the proportions set forth in the attachment referred to in section 2 of this order.")

This is extremely explicit. Also: no, not that Union Jack.

The colors are another story. While it is true that the flag code never specifies the exact shades of red, white and blue to use, there is a specification for them. Federal Specification DDD-F-416F clearly states in section 3.5 that "The colors, from the Standard Color Reference of America, 10th Edition (see 2.2), of the US National Flag are as follows: Old Glory Red, White, Old Glory Blue".

These colors are then further defined in the aforementioned Standard Color Reference of America. (Color definitions are complicated, so I won't quote them here. Go look at 'em yourself if you're so inclined.)

Now, DDD-F-416F only applies to flags procured for official, federal use. It's probably the most official answer to "which colors should we use for the flag" but it's not the only answer. All they have to be is red white and blue. (For my money, if Yang_WenIi's flag ended up before the Supreme Court, I think they'd rule that particular shade "pink".)

Does any of this matter? No. Absolutely not.

Furthermore, neither I nor the U.S. government (in theory) have any problem with you desecrating the flag. I'll even say I encourage it. (Biden not so much, methinks.)

But please, for the love of god, stop lying so blatantly about what the law actually says. It's not very long, this shouldn't be so hard. You don't need to appeal to Dwight Eisenhower's authority just to twist the U.S. flag into the trans one. You can just do that. Please stop lying.

K? K.

[bonefall]

I know that cats and humans didn't get along before Bumble according to the legend of the Rogue of Rot but do cats ever look at twolegs and curse the Rogue for upsetting Bumble or else they could ask twolegs what in StarClan's name are they're doing because it looks ridiculous or for them to exchange information like how they can build or cook or craft? Or for medicine cats, how they treat more complicated issues that kittypets seem to be able to get help for that the medicine cats are still trying to figure out and thus basically a death sentence if diagnosed? Yes there's the code that says they reject the soft life of a kittypet but it's not being a kittypet if you're taking the information back to the clans and applying it yourself instead of having the twoleg to do it all for you.

No, that's really not what cultural view of humans is like. Maybe in SkyClan, but certainly not Forest Four.

They really believe that not knowing their words is for their own protection. They want nothing to do with humans as a value; the Law is just a codification of sentiment that was deeply rooted. They're fearful and even violent towards them.

And they don't really have a lot of information about them as a result, certainly not enough to envy them. They aren't aware of "kittypets surviving things they don't," they don't talk to them. If they did, that kind of talk would see other cats start to question your loyalty.

Pinestar couldn't even share kibble with his Clan while they starved because the taboo is so strong. Let alone start gushing about how soft the blankets are.

Many years later, this is an important hurdle the researchers have to overcome. Clan cats get massively stressed out if they're around them, making very skittish specimens and messing with data collection.

There's one tiny debaucle where Firestar digs a trail cam out of the ground and drops it in a ravine! Expensive equipment, smashed to bits! They're even more careful after that, lmao.

[eternal-echoes]

“The canon law of marriage held that a valid marriage required the free consent of both the man and the woman, and that a marriage could be held invalid if it took place under duress or if one of the parties entered into the marriage on the basis of a mistake regarding either the identity or some important quality of the other person. "Here," writes Berman, "were the foundations not only of the modern law of marriage but also of certain basic elements of modern contract law, namely, the concept of free will and related concepts of mistake, duress, and fraud."1 And by implementing these crucial principles in law, Catholic jurists were at last able to overcome the common practice of infant marriage that owed its origins to barbarian custom.2 Barbarian practice thus gave way to Catholic principle. Through the codification and promulgation of a systematic body of law, the salutary principles of Catholic belief were able to make their way into the daily practices of European peoples who had adopted Catholicism but who had all too often failed to draw out all its implications. These principles remain central to the modern legal orders under which Westerners, and more and more non-Westerners, continue to live.”

- Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D., “The Church and Western Law,” How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

—

1. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 228.

2. Harold J. Berman, "The Influence of Christianity Upon the Development of Law," Oklahoma Law Review 12 (1959), 93

[empirearchives]

The introduction of the Napoleonic Code in Bavaria

Probably the best codification work of the Rhine Confederation period was the draft of a "General Civil Code for the Kingdom of Bavaria" from 1808/09, which was essentially based on the suggestions of Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach. By starting codification work, the Bavarian King Maximilian IV wanted to give in to Napoleon's urging to introduce his code in Bavaria as well. In a report for the Ministry of Justice in 1808 "on the manner of introducing the Code Napoleon in a German country", Feuerbach highlighted the main ideas of the Code Napoleon: freedom of the person; legal equality of subjects; equality of laws for all citizens of the state ; Freedom of property as well as independence and independence of the state from the church in all civil matters. For him, the Napoleonic Code was a result of the French Revolution: "It was the purpose of French legislation, on the one hand, to completely end the Revolution, on the other, to perpetuate the beneficial results of the Revolution".

Anyone who wants to destroy the basic ideas of a code of law through modification kills “the truly spiritual life of it and turns the living body into a corpse. In the modification retort, on which the inconvenient spiritus rector was supposed to evaporate, nothing more than a caput mortuum would ultimately remain, which would hardly be worth keeping. Precisely those parts of French legislation which contradict our existing German principles are its brightest points." When the discussions of the draft in the Privy Council were almost completed, the conservative aristocratic opposition brought down the proposal in 1809/10. Particularly because of the changes to mortgage law proposed by Feuerbach, the Bavarian draft represents a German version of the Napoleonic Code that is quite equal to the French original. Feuerbach paid particular attention to the linguistic version: insofar as a regulation of the Napoleonic Code should be retained, he was concerned with translating the French original into a "pure German legal language, not tainted by any provincialisms, possibly with the same advantages." However, this should not obscure the fact that the Commission has often exceeded the limits of mere translation. The most important change was that almost all traces of the French judicial constitution were erased from the draft. Article 530 of the Code Napoléon was also modified so that the replacement of perpetual basic pensions should only be permitted with the consent of both parties. The inheritance law was based on the succession order of Austrian law. The property law, which was almost completely ignored by the Napoleonic Code, was regulated in a separate chapter.

Source: Werner Schubert, Der Code civil (Code Napoléon) in Deutschland und das Reichsgericht

[Bold italics by me]