Via H-Law, we have the following
call for papers:
specialized justices and justices except in the colonial space
(16th-20th centuries): Themis Overseas 2
Call for Papers - Symposium, December 9, 2016
(Call for papers - Seminar - 2016-12-09)
Judicial
systems are generally divided into two major categories of
jurisdiction, which can also intermingle and obviously complement the
one hand the so-called ordinary courts, skills extended to the whole of
the common law, and specialized courts say or exception.
Modern
and contemporary settlements are no exception to this institutional
duality. The Old Colonial System knew, and to stick by the French
example, regular judicial institutions, also modeled more or less on the
metropolitan model (sovereign advice and senior Quebec, Louisiana and
the Caribbean, royal justices of the Valley of the St. Lawrence, etc.),
but also specialized justices, such as military or admiralty justices.
The provinces under British rule after 1763 and into the 1860s also knew
their " Special short " ( Courts Martial , Prerogative Courts for ecclesiastical justice, Court of Vice Admiralty,
etc.). The Second French Empire also coexist, as in Algeria, in black
Africa or Indochina, the trial courts, criminal courts, courts of
appeal, courts of assizes, etc. - JPs can in turn be linked both to the
ordinary courts at the specialized justice - to which we can aggregate
the Muslim courts resolutely dedicated to native litigants between them
and the Jewish courts. Perhaps we could expand and multiply examples for
other European colonial spaces of the period.
However,
the exceptional nature of justice in colonial lands can take different
forms or be considered on another level because it works with strangers
courts in France or experiencing specific situations properly Colonial:
in French Louisiana, justice military supplied the largely ordinary
royal justice, especially in the Upper Mississippi where the second
existed only on paper; we know that in the neighboring American
colonies, whether legal architecture was modeled on the metropolitan
model, the organization and operation of real English colonial courts
there were quite different; more striking still, criminal justice in
French India 18th century was the work of the court Chauderie, singular
instance. In British Canada, as we have already mentioned, existed
foreign judicial institutions in Britain and the Militia Officers and the Trinity Houses specialized in processing small river and commercial offenses in the St. Lawrence Valley . During the Raj British coexisted almost
two justices, one white, the other "coolie", the violence of the first
acting on the second. German colonies, both in Africa and in the
Pacific, experienced its own judicial administration, with little
relation to that present in European part of the Reich . These are just a few of the recall.
All
these specialized justices or exception, both from an institutional
point of view as a practical reality, is worth investigating or updated.
These justices have completed the regular system, or ensured the
existence of a singular political justice and that is the double
advantage of this conference to want to understand the colonial judicial
system as a whole.
We will return to
the title from the founder prospect raised by the first colonial empire.
Thus in a judicial system that was originally based on a desire to
colonies of simplification would soon lead to a proliferation of
specific judicial institutions. It is necessary to analyze this
phenomenon, identify institutions that aggregate at the initial
organizational structure, to examine the reasons and check operation. A
typology should be outlined including on the basis of a diptych:
Additional justices / justices policies similar to the metropolitan
phenomenon himself has been sensitive to the seventeenth century (with
the practice of justices by committee).
Similarly
we will seek to understand how the second colonial empire extended, but
also exceeds, at least in scale, this phenomenon that goes through an
overflow justices ordinary or common law. In a context where the nature
of the judicial system is changing and the notion of justice becomes
special, and the concept of political justice, metropolitan principles
are cantilevered to the colonies. The design of "natural judges" is
inadequate, the weight of the argument based on local characteristics is
growing to challenge the implementation of inclination of regular
judicial institutions or pervert.
This
second study day will have a dual role: that of the institutional
history (operation, competences and powers, justice personnel, etc.) and
the legal history (justice practices, gender issues, such as
specialized justices reflection of the colonial culture, etc.). The
complexity of the issues deserves careful preparation. Here we rethink
the prism of the colonial context the terms "special justices ','
exceptional justices," "political righteousness."
This
symposium (in French and English) will be open to both legal
historians, historians of justice and colonial historians of modern and
contemporary periods.