Law and Revolution

What Hacker News says

1. traject_Sep 2024
   The timeline overlaps with the Peace of God movement and the Gregorian reforms which legal historian Harold Berman calls the Papal Revolution in his book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Also coincides with the beginnings of renavatio that Charles Taylor mentions in A Secular Age. You could argue though that perhaps it took some time until the population fully Christianized; it is precisely in this time period we start seeing the use of familiar Biblical along with a set of standardized Germanic first names all across Europe while old Germanic naming conventions start to disappear.
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2. raincomNov 2020
   The modern "Insanity defense" is a secularization of Christian Law (say, Canon Law). What does secularization consists of? Replace the theological reasoning with non-theological ones. Here is what Harold Berman says in his "Law and revolution: The formation of the Western legal tradition":

   "A bizarre example may shed light on the paradoxes of a legal tradition that has lost contact with its theological sources. If a sane man is convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and thereafter, before the sentence is carried out, he becomes insane, his execution will be postponed until he recovers his sanity.

   Generally speaking, this is the law in Western countries and in many non-Western countries as well. Why? The historical answer, in the West, is that if a man is executed while he is insane he will not have had the opportunity freely to confess his sins and to take the sacrament of holy communion. He must be allowed to recover his sanity before he dies so that his soul will not be condemned to eternal hellfire but will instead have the opportunity to expiate his sins in purgatory and ultimately, at the Last Judgment, to enter the kingdom of heaven. But where none of this is believed, why keep the insane man alive until he recovers, and then kill him?

   The example is, perhaps, of minor importance in itself; but what it illustrates is that the legal systems of all Western countries, and of all nonWestern countries that have come under the influence of Western law, are a secular residue of religious attitudes and assumptions which historically found expression first in the liturgy and rituals and doctrine of the church and thereafter in the institutions and concepts and values of the law. When these historical roots are not understood, many parts of the law appear to lack any underlying source of validity." (pp 165-166)

   If you strip away this interesting theological context, the insanity defense doesn't make any sense.

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