Where when and how did the idea of “reasonableness” originate? What period did it come into regular legal usage? Did it originate as a judicial device first or did it begin as something that would be explicitly coded into statutes?
See Harold J. Berman, &quot;The Origins of Historical Jurisprudence: Coke, Selden, Hale&quot; (1994) 103 Yale Law Journal 1651, p. 1691, n. 101: the translation of &quot;reason&quot; into &quot;reasonableness&quot; and the exaltation of &quot;common sense&quot; are English developments of the seventeenth century, to which Coke contributed. At p. 1718-19: Coke had said it is the nature of law to be reasonable, and that the test of reasonableness is its ability to withstand the test of time. See also S.E. Thorne, &quot;Dr. Bonham's Case&quot; (1938) 54 Law Quarterly Review 543, p. 543: To students of the origins of American constitutional law and theory no judicial utterance of Sir Edward Coke can surpass in interest and importance his so-called dictum in Dr. Bonham's case, decided in the Court of Common Pleas in 1610. It is widely regarded as foreshadowing not merely the power which American courts to-day exercise in the disallowance of statutes on the ground of their conflict with the constitution, but also that very test of 'reasonableness' which is the ultimate flowing of that power. This concept as a ground of review arose in the context of &quot;conflict between Parliament and the Crown over the nature and limits of prerogative and the common law&quot; (Michael Foran, &quot;The Constitutional Foundations of Reasonableness Review: Artificial Reason and Wrongful Discrimination&quot; (2022) 26:3 Edinburgh Law Review 295, p. 299). In one case, the Case of Prohibitions (1607) 12 Co. Rep. 63, 77 E.R. 1342 (K.B.), Coke repealed a judgment of King James I, on the basis that the judgment was not grounded in the common law. Coke said: &quot;causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes of his subjects, are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law.&quot; This is in contrast to a view that Crown action would not be substantively reviewable. By defining reasonableness as something that can only be determined through the wisdom of judges, Coke was broadening the judicial power.
Warrants are issued upon probable cause The Supreme Court defined this in 1964 in Beck v. Ohio as: whether at [the moment of arrest] the facts and circumstances within [an officer's] knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information [are] sufficient to warrant a prudent [person] in believing that [a suspect] had committed or was committing an offense In the context of warrants, the Oxford Companion to American Law defines probable cause as: information sufficient to warrant a prudent person's belief that the wanted individual had committed a crime (for an arrest warrant) or that evidence of a crime or contraband would be found in a search (for a search warrant) In Brinegar v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court defines probable cause as: where the facts and circumstances within the officers' knowledge, and of which they have reasonably trustworthy information, are sufficient in themselves to warrant a belief by a man of reasonable caution that a crime is being committed In the scenario that you describe the testimony of the child almost certainly gives rise to probable cause. A warrant issued on that basis is likely to be broad enough for the investigation to follow the path that you suggest - if the child claims there were inappropriate photos sent to them and there was evidence of subsequent deletion, law enforcement are entitled to trace that back to wherever it leads.
Yes, a judge may use the bible when making a decision. However, the usage nearly always takes the form of citation (in the form of scholarly texts) rather than precedent. That said, the lines get blurry sometimes. In Banks v. Maxwell, 171 S.E. 70 (N.C. 1933), the N.C. Supreme Court was tasked with resolving a dispute where the plaintiff had been gored by a bull. As a means of anchoring precedent and establishing a strict liability rule when a bull has previously gored, it stated "[t]he familiar rule of liability for injuries inflicted by cattle has remained approximately constant for more than 3,000 years. This rule of liability was expressed by Moses in the following words..." The court goes on to cite Exodus 21:28-30.
Nope. Even if we were to accept this definition of law as some written decree, and I'm unsure that's the case1, there are civilisations with written law that predate the Ten Commandments. Babylonian Law (c.1800 BC) predates the Ten Commandments. Also, the Code of Ur-Nammu predates even that (c.2050 BC). 1. Most definitions of law don't require that it be written, but rather that it is some system of rules that govern the behaviour of some group of people.
The concept of law predates writing. "Law" refers not only to the system of rules, as your definition notes, but to the individual rules making up that system (for example, there is a law that prohibits theft). An act is, more generally than the definition you quote, a thing that is done (for example, someone who is discovered committing a crime can be said to have been "caught in the act.") This also does not depend on writing. In our literate times, however, when a legislature (or any body, such as a corporate board of directors), wants to achieve something, someone writes a description of a proposed result. When the body makes a formal decision to adopt the written document (by a vote, for example), it is deciding to do the thing described in the document; that is, it is deciding to act. Typically, for a legislature, the thing it's doing is to create, modify, or repeal a law. It's not very difficult to see how a document that describes a legislature's desire to act came to be called an act. In some contexts, however, it can also be called a law. So the word law can refer to the entire system (as in law school), to a particular act (as in the legislature passed a law today called the XYZ Act), or indeed to a particular rule or section of an act (as in the law in question is subparagraph 2(B)(ii)(b) of the XYZ Act). Law can also refer to case law, of course, or regulatory law, so we tend to use statutory law or statute to denote the laws created through the legislative process. In conclusion, the word "law" has several related meanings, so its use can be imprecise. When speaking about specific paragraphs, precision may be in order. In a case like this, where a paragraph create exceptions to rules laid out in a preceding paragraph, it doesn't make a lot of sense to describe each paragraph as a "law." The numbered items in statutory text can be called many things, and usually have different names depending on the level at which they are found. So I would not know whether these are sections, subsections, paragraphs, subparagraphs, or something else. If I were unable to find the correct terminology for (in this case) India, would probably use a generic term like "items."
The Declaration of Independence is often cited (along with the Federalist Papers) when the court is attempting to justify a particular interpretation of The Constitution by looking at the intent of the drafters. For example, in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission 576 U.S. ____ (2015), in establishing that the people have ultimate sovereignty quoted the Declaration of Independence: Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed... Following that (after also quoting some text from the Constitution), Justice Ginsberg concludes: In this light, it would be perverse to interpret the term “Legislature” in the Elections Clause so as to exclude lawmaking by the people, particularly where such lawmaking is intended to check legislators’ ability to choose the district lines they run in... As a second example, Justice Scalia, in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges 576 U.S. ___ (2015), refers to the Declaration of Independence: This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.
There are many countries / states / provinces in North America, each with their own laws on this subject, so this question is potentially quite broad. I will focus on the United States. To this day, it is legal in all 50 US states for a parent to strike a child as a means of discipline ("corporal punishment"), but laws generally include a requirement that the force used is "reasonable" in some sense. However, it is not legal for a parent to cause serious injury to a child. The line between "reasonable punishment" and "serious injury" seems to not be well defined, and may have shifted over time due to changes in law, court decisions, or prosecutorial discretion. So the answer may hinge on what you mean by the word "beating". However, spanking seems to be generally considered "reasonable" under the law. I found the following article which explores this issue in depth: Coleman, Doriane Lambelet; Dodge, Kenneth A;, and Campbell, Sarah Keeton. Where and how to draw the line between reasonable corporal punishment and abuse. 73 Law and Contemporary Problems 107-166 (Spring 2010). http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol73/iss2/6
Brief detentions and reasonable suspicion You can be briefly detained by police if they have reasonable suspicion that you committed a crime. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968) What reasonable suspicion "means" can only be fully understood by reference to subsequent case law (which I will expand this answer to do), but as a basis, the court said in Terry that: the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion This standard has been reiterated as recently as in Heien v. North Carolina 574 U. S. ____ (2014), where they say "All parties agree that to justify this type of seizure [a traffic stop, in the case of Heien], officers need only reasonable suspicion — that is, a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person stopped of breaking the law" (internal quotation marks omitted). The reasonable suspicion standard was also used recently in Navarette v. California 572 U. S. ____ (2014). They reiterated that reasonable suspicion is dependent upon both the content of information possessed by police and its degree of reliability, quoting Alabama v. White, 496 U. S. 325, 330 (1990). A mere "hunch" does not create reasonable suspicion, but the level of suspicion required by the reasonable suspicion standard is "obviously less than is necessary for probable cause". Arrests and probable cause To be arrested, police require probable cause. Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949) In more detail, probable cause exists (from Brinegar v. U.S.): where the facts and circumstances within the officers' knowledge, and of which they have reasonably trustworthy information, are sufficient in themselves to warrant a belief by a man of reasonable caution that a crime is being committed Also: The rule of probable cause is a practical, nontechnical conception affording the best compromise that has been found for accommodating these often opposing interests. Requiring more would unduly hamper law enforcement. To allow less would be to leave law-abiding citizens at the mercy of the officers' whim or caprice. As in the case of reasonable suspicion, the probable cause analysis is case-by-case and fact-intensive, so to understand the contours of probable cause will require reference to much subsequent case law. In Beck v. Ohio, 379 U.S. 89 (1964) the question before the court was entirely "whether or not the record in the case before us can support a finding of probable cause for the petitioner's arrest". In that case, it turned out that the information they had received about the arrestee was not sufficient for probable cause, but regardless, the test the court applied was whether the police had probable cause for the arrest. Notes While I am confident in the correctness of this answer, what each of these standards means will take hours of work to flesh out, which I plan to do. The courts have repeatedly reiterated and referred to these decisions/standards, but the analysis is very fact-intensive and is done case-by-case. Also, I realize the presentation is a little scattershot, as I'm first just looking to include relevant cases and statements the court has made about these standards, but I'll re-make it into a coherent story every once in a while.