Would publicly farting on a picture of the English monarch actually qualify as treason in 1798? A famous political cartoon from 1798 by Richard Newton claims that farting on a picture of the British monarch would be prosecutable as &quot;TREASON!!!&quot; (caps and multiple exclamation marks in original). Would this act actually qualify as Treason under English law in 1798? According to the Treason Act 1351, treason consists of: ...when a man doth compass or imagine the death of our lord the King, or of our lady his Queen or of their eldest son and heir; or if a man do violate the King's companion,....or if a man do levy war against our lord the King in his realm, or be adherent to the King's enemies in his realm, giving to them aid and comfort in the realm, or elsewhere.... Farting on someone's picture is not the same thing as compassing or imagining their death, violating their heirs or companion, or levying war against them. The Treason act 1702 covers attempts to interfere with the royal line of succession, not disrespecting a picture. So, is there any truth to this cartoon? To be clear, I'm not asking whether it was socially acceptable in England of the 1790's to publicly pass gas on someone's picture (nor whether it is acceptable to do so today), but whether it fit the legal definition of Treason under any statutory or common law offense that would have been in effect in 1798. More specifically, either of the following scenarios seems plausible: This was literally treason in 1798, and the cartoon's purpose is to point out the absurdity of treating toilet humor shenanigans as legally equivalent to murdering the king or waging grim war against him. This was not actually treason, but the point of the cartoon was a warning against contemporary trends in expanding the scope of criminal offenses to cover unusual or non-obvious scenarios. In other words, this was an exaggeration to emphasize that criminal law was getting so ridiculously broad that farting on a picture might soon be prosecutable as a major offense if the cartoon's readers didn't start advocating for more narrow and sensible laws.
The cartoon may call back to events of 1795, where George III had stones thrown at him while he was on his way to the State Opening of Parliament. In response, the government - headed by Pitt the Younger, who is the man in the picture saying &quot;That is treason, Johnny&quot; - passed &quot;An Act for the Safety and Preservation of His Majesty’s Person and Government against Treasonable and Seditious Practices and Attempts&quot;, 36 Geo. 3 c.7. We now call it the Treason Act 1795. It was one of a series of Acts that suspended habeas corpus, banned political meetings, and so on, in the wake of the French Revolution. Section 1 deals with treason, at some length, but a fart probably doesn't count. The conditions are that somebody would: within the Realm or without, compass, imagine, invent, devise, or intend Death or Destruction, or any bodily Harm tending to Death or Destruction, Maim or Wounding, Imprisonment or Restraint, of the Person of our same Sovereign Lord the King, his Heirs and Successors, or to deprive or depose him or them from the Style, Honour, or Kingly Name of the Imperial Crown of this Realm, or of any other of his Majesty’s Dominions or Countries; or to levy War against his Majesty, his Heirs or Successors, within his Realm, in order, by Force or Constraint, to compel him or them to change his or their Measures or Counsels, or in order to put any Force or Constraint upon, or to intimidate, or overawe, both Houses, or either House of Parliament; or to move or stir any Foreigner or Stranger with Force to invade this Realm, or any other of his Majesty’s Dominions or Countries, under the Obeisance of his Majesty, his Heirs or Successors; and such Compassings, Imaginations, Inventions, Devices, or Intentions, or any of them, shall express, utter, or declare, by publishing any Printing or Writing, or by any overt Act or Deed The text is substantially preserved in the Treason Felony Act 1848, section 3. The 1795 Act also created a &quot;High Misdemeanour&quot; for anyone who shall maliciously and advisedly, by Writing, Printing, Preaching, or other Speaking, express, publish, utter, or declare, any Words or Sentences to excite or stir up the People to hatred or Contempt of the Person of his Majesty, his Heirs or Successors, or the Government and Constitution of this Realm, as by Law established This is closer to the fart; it is a lèse-majesté provision aimed at general disrespect for the King. The provision was due to expire in 1798. I do not know the detailed timeline of its expiry and proposed renewal in relation to when the cartoon was published, but this is a plausible connection to why it was a live issue again. In Scotland, but not England, there were common-law offences of sedition and &quot;leasing-making&quot; covering the same sort of idea. They were abolished in 2010 but were long obsolete. Hume (Commentaries on the Law of Scotland, 1797) distinguishes between them by saying that leasing-making is solely verbal, a species of slander, whereas sedition is words or deeds &quot;for the purpose of producing public trouble or commotion, and moving His Majesty's subjects to the dislike, resistance, or subversion of the established government and laws, or settled frame and order of things.&quot; In any event, the political cartoon is satire and does not necessarily represent a legal reality. It is mocking Pitt's heavy-handedness in the Act of 1795, and perhaps challenging the authorities to define this very cartoon as criminal. Newton's mentor, William Holland, had been imprisoned for seditious libel for publishing Thomas Paine's Letter Addressed to the Addressers, on the Late Proclamation. The proclamation in question was the one of 1792 against seditious writing, also the work of Pitt, and aimed at Paine's Rights of Man, a work advocating for (among other things) freedom of the press and abolition of the monarchy. Therefore there is a specific personal and political edge to criticising Pitt's repressive legislation.
The law was first promulgated on June 8, 1940 By the 76th Congress. The original text is here. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly important piece of legislation and I can find commentary on it and I’m not going to read the debates - if you do, please get back to us. Two points to note, it was passed at a time when most of the rest of the world was at war and the US was quietly preparing to be at war and it seems to be intended to fill a gap in state law since conviction under state law is a defence under Federal.
Probably not. As I understand it, the case is being run in Scotland on the belief that Scottish constitutional law is more likely to allow this claim than English law is. That is why the case is not being run in the High Court of England and Wales. The case can't start in the Supreme Court because (apart from specific kinds of disputes) the Supreme Court only hears appeals (see the Constitutional Reform Act 2005). If the Court of Session rejects the case, the plaintiffs might then appeal to the Supreme Court, which would hear the appeal under Scottish law. Scottish law is different to English law, but there's only one Parliament and one Crown. The letter you linked to goes to great lengths to highlight possible differences between Scottish and English law, but they all occur prior to the Treaty of Union which took effect in 1707. The Scottish Parliament's Union with England Act 1707, section 18, says that Scottish law continues in force except insofar as it is inconsistent with the Treaty. A law which provided for Ministers' or the Crown's powers to be curtailed in Scotland but not in England (in respect to a single indivisible subject matter such as the Parliament) would be inconsistent with the core proposition of the Treaty, which is the creating of a joint Crown and a joint Parliament (sections 1 and 2 of the Act). The above difficulties are to say nothing of the low likelihood that any court can: (a) stop Ministers from giving advice, given that the Minister is not exercising any power (only the Queen can actually prorogue Parliament); or (b) stop the Queen from proroguing Parliament (since Her Majesty is the source of the court's authority, and not subject to it). (For completeness it should be noted that the Scottish Parliament that passed the Union with England Act 1707 and the current Scottish Parliament are two entirely different things. The current Scottish Parliament was created by the UK Parliament's Scotland Act 1998, and its powers are set out in that Act. The current Scottish Parliament is prohibited from legislating with respect to the union with England (schedule 5 paragraph 1).) The letter also says that proroguing Parliament would be inconsistent with the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018. That Act expressly says that: the European Communities Act 1972 will be repealed on exit day (section 1); and up until two years after exit day, the Government can make regulations with the force of law to deal with deficiencies in UK law caused by Brexit, e.g. the conferral of powers under UK law on an EU body (presumably the regulations could transfer that power to a UK body) (section 8). The Act goes on to say that, if it gets Parliament's approval for a withdrawal agreement, the Government can make regulations with the force of law to implement that withdrawal agreement. If there is no withdrawal agreement, then there's no need for the Government to get Parliament's approval. Not only does the Act not say that Parliament needs to sit in order to consider Brexit, but it expressly sets out a coherent way to deal with the consequences of a no-deal Brexit, namely the regulations made under section 8. The case is pretty weak and would require a very adventurous judge to approve it. EDIT: Well fuck me: https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2019/41.html
The modern rule in the UK is that copyright lasts until the end of the calendar year following 70 years after the death of the author. So if the author died in or later than 1953, it would be under copyright under this general rule. However, this wasn't always the rule and the museum speaks of a copyright revived in the 1990s. So I went down that rabbit hole of historical UK copyright legislation. I personally find it interesting, but it turned out to not be entirely determinative. It all turns on publication date and date of death of the artist, neither of which I can find, with the museum only stating the artist was active in the 1930s. But even assuming the most favourable facts for this to still be copyright under a &quot;revived&quot; copyright, the latest date I can find for copyright to still remain under that regime is end of 2015. Per Copyright Act 1956 s. 3(4)(a): in the case of an engraving, if before the death of the author the engraving had not been published, the copyright shall continue to subsist until the end of the period of fifty years from the end of the calendar year in which it is first published; For the fact pattern I'm outlining, we must assume the author died before publication. As for the engraving bit, s. 48 defines that lithographs are engravings, and while I am far from an expert in this field, skimming the Wikipedia article on lithography, it does seem quite possible the poster could be a lithograph. I'll note here since you bring up who precisely would be the owner of the original copyright, that it does seem likely that the poster was a work for hire, following the provisions of s. 4(2). As such, the copyright would have indeed ultimately transferred to British Rail. Jumping ahead a bit, the more precise year which the museum states is &quot;the 1990's&quot; is 1995 (we'll get to why). So in order for copyright to have first expired as per the museum's statement and the authors active years, we must assume a publication date between 1930-1945 (or thereabouts, I'm not being super careful in this answer about the months things happen in, so there may be accumulation of off-by-one errors). Because of those years, I now have to quickly address why the Copyright Act 1911 isn't relevant. The transitional provisions outlined in the Seventh Schedule reveal that only for photographs are the copyright duration provisions maintained from the 1911 Act. Now we can jump into the modern law, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA). The transitional provision in the Schedule 1 s. 12(2)(b) directly maintains the 1956 copyright duration in this case which given our possible publication years, would have led to copyright expiry sometime between 1980-1995. However, in 1995, the UK passed The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995. This was in accordance with European legislation harmonizing copyright duration, in Directive 93/98/EEC (itself since replaced by Directive 2006/116/EC). Side Note: 1995 is a peculiar year for copyrights in Europe due to that directive and so is exactly where I started my research for this answer, because it caused weird quirks for copyright terms in some countries in some cases. For the UK, s. 5 of the regulation amended the CDPA, basically establishing the general European standard of copyrights expiring 70 years after the author's death. More importantly for our case though is the regulations own section explaining in which cases the new copyright term expires. In s. 16: The new provisions relating to duration of copyright apply— (a) [...] (b) [...] (c) [...] (d) to existing works in which copyright expired before 31st December 1995 but which were on 1st July 1995 protected in another EEA state under legislation relating to copyright or related rights. Now, I'm not going to go through and look at all the EEA contries legislation to confirm, but it seems incredibly likely that one of them would have had engravings protected for life+70 in 1995, given that's what Europe has now standardized on (since we're assuming pre-publication death for an author who was active in the 1930s). Notably, s. 17 even defines cases of expired works re-entering copyright as &quot;revived copyright&quot;, matching the terminology the museum's statement used. It would have been great if the 1995 regulation explicitly spelled out the relationship with CDPA's Schedule 1 s. 12, but in judicial interpretation, newer legislation takes priority, so the 1995 law would control. Note: The answer is getting long enough so I'm not going to fully research/cite this, but for regulations vs. legislation, we have a weird case of a regulation amending a statute. I'm fairly certain this is due to UK Acts passed for European Community membership elevating regulations to primary legislation when they are passed for compliance with European law. So given our assumed facts, the poster would have revived copyright per the 1995 Regulations. However, you may note (as I belatedly did after first posting this answer) that even given revived copyright, that revived copyright is still life+70. And the assumptions made for copyright revival under this clause requires a posthumous publication date of 1945 at the latest. This means at best any copyright under these particular circumstances would have expired in 2015. There is a bit of a middle ground here. If the poster is not a lithograph, or the publication was not posthumous, the work would have gained a life+50 term per aformentioned Copyright Act 1956 s. 3(4). But then for copyright to expire and be revived, we still have to assume a 1945 death date at the latest. Alternatively, instead of copyright revival, it could have gotten extended from life+50 to life+70 per the 1995 Regulations s. 16(c). But because we are more than 20 years from 1995, it mathematically works out that it doesn't matter anymore and we can just work with the life+70 rule. A combination of 1995 Regulations s. 16(c) and posthumous publication though does actually give another reasonable way for the work to still be under copyright. If published in 1988 before the CDPA entered into force, it would have followed the cited 1956 rules of copyright expiring 50 years after publication. The 1995 Regulations s. 16(c) specifies that longer existing terms can continue. So that results in 2038 as a latest possible year through this method. In the end I think there are two or three reasonable interpretations: The museum is correct the work is under copyright, but incorrect about the reason. It's instead because the work is under copyright because the author died after 1953 (or is still living), or The work is still covered under the 50 years after posthumous publication rule for engravings established in the Copyright Act 1956 (publication years 1973-1988 for copyright expiry at the end of calendar years 2023-2038). The museum is correct that copyright was revived, but I can't find a way for this to be true and for the work to still be under copyright (with 2015 the latest year I can find for the given facts). Note that this is my own reading of legislation, please take it with a grain of salt.
In English law there isn't a specific offence of &quot;mooning&quot;. However: It is conceivable that under Public Order legislation someone mooning could be found guilty of causing &quot;harassment, alarm or distress&quot;. There was a man arrested for mooning a speed camera, charged with a public order offence and subsequently acquitted. In 2010 a Kent man was issued with an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) that banned him from mooning (among other things). ASBOs were civil orders, breach of which was a criminal offence. Had that man continued to moon, he could have been found guilty of the criminal offence of breaching the order. (ASBOs have since been replaced with a system of civil injunctions and civil behaviour orders.) It is conceivable that repeatedly mooning one or more particular people would be deemed harrassment. I am not aware of criminal cases but there was an employment tribunal case that found the person had committed sexual harrassment in the workplace because they had mooned a colleague. At common law it is an offence to outrage public decency, &quot;an act which is lewd, obscene or of disgusting character, which outrages minimum standards of public decency as assessed by the jury.&quot; I doubt whether a brief moon would amount to that; worse behaviour might.
Law The origin of the phrase is from the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). It specifically rules on the limitation of freedom of speech (first amendment): The original ruling is this: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. As pointed out by @phoog, this does not saying anything about the lawfullness of shouting "fire", it says that if your speech creates a clear and present danger, the first amendment will not protect you, even if the danger does not result in actual harm. Commentary If these instances are correct then it would seem clear that Freedom of Speech is being honored as it's the result of speech, not the speech itself, that could be an offense. You seem to think that it should be illegal, but only if it results in a panic that endangers people. If people ignore you, you think it should be protected by your first amendment rights. That's not how the law works. The law tries, among other things. To establish norms for human behaviour. For example, you will be punished for driving an automobile while intoxicated, even of this does not result in you running over somebody. In the words of the supreme court: If your actions "are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger", the congress has the right to prevent you from doing so, despite the first amendment.
Well, moral obligations are not laws, nor sometimes even moral obligations. Some laws are based on what some courts and legislatures think are moral obligations. We think cannibals have a moral obligation not to eat people; cannibals think non-cannibals are fools for passing up a good BBQ. As for a leader's moral responsibility for millions of lives, we can take as extreme examples Mao, Hilter, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., that there are no obligations. The law that could apply in the case of a POTUS who does not "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States..." (oath of office for POTUS) is that of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors", the grounds for most impeachments. But "faithfully executing the Office of President" has no moral obligation; it has legal implications, that's all. High crimes or misdemeanor are legal definitions, not moral, and depend on previous cases of what a crime or misdemeanor is. Insobriety can be illegal; there are laws on the books concerning public drunkenness. But in the contest of POTUS (one who is hopefully not passed out on the sidewalk in front of the WH), it remains to be seen if insobriety is a high crime or misdemeanor. That would be up to the House Judiciary Committee and US House of Representatives, which by Constitutional powers handles impeachment proceedings. The Twenty-fifth Amendment outlines who succeeds the president due to "Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office," but it does not state who has the power to declare a President incapacitated. It's possible that a POTUS who incapacitates himself with alcohol is guilty of a "high crime or misdemeanor." But how drunk do you have to be to be incapacitated? Drunk enough to think a Game Boy is the nuclear football? Again, that's up to the House. Some past presidents have arguably been functional alcoholics (or functional recovered alcoholics.) But incapacitated? That can be subjective when it comes to the application of the law. And morals have little to do with it, unless those morals have a basis in that same law. Update 12/04/16: Some federal judges have been impeached due to drunkenness: http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/judges_impeachments.html and http://www.crf-usa.org/impeachment/high-crimes-and-misdemeanors.html
There are a lot more differences than this, but if your teacher sums up what he/she means by that sentence. Here, specifically, in Civil Law, the decision of the courts must comply with the laws as enacted, which means there are specific statutes required to make something illegal. Common Law features Stare Decisis which basically means that if Case A is decided in one way, and Case B is a similar Case to Case B, Case B must yield the same decision for all cases in that jurisdiction and lower courts below that court. This means that while statutes (laws) can be made by a legislature, the courts can "make law" by deciding cases. For example, some States in the United States and England and Wales only recently (within the past 30 years) adopted an actual law that made murder illegal? Prior to that murder was illegal under Common Law Murder that had been based on precedence from bazillion cases before that said it's illegal. Nobody bothered to write it down in an actual law. There are several other big differences such as Inquisitorial vs. Adversarial nature of courts, how and when punishments are decided (The famous "Just following Orders" Defense was given in part because of this difference and a lack of understanding over it.), who is the trier of fact vs. who is the trier of law, but as far as what is "Law" this is a good single summation of the difference in a single sentence. But it really shouldn't be condensed to a single sentence.