Is the killing of human being less punishable than that of a cow in India because of British Common Law? Refer to this article, ... 14 Years Of Jail For Killing A Cow, 2 Years For Killing A Human Being ... What is the source of this law? Is this law derived from British Common Law? If YES, does Britain still have such law?
The article appears to follow an ancient and disreputable tradition; researching one instance where a crime was lightly punished (but ignoring the reasons), finding another where an apparently more trivial crime was heavily punished (again ignoring the reasoning), and claiming that the law punishes the latter more heavily than the former. As long as people are readier to be outraged than to think, this will make money for muckrakers. The legal answer (since this has been transferred to Law.SE) is that common law by definition does not lay down specific penalties for offences. It is possible that Indian common law, being heavily influenced by Hinduism, dictates that killing a cow is a crime outside the Western code, in which it may be a tort but is not a crime unless it involves cruelty. Again by definition, this common law understanding would have nothing to do with the British (or any other) authorities.
The phrase "of chaste life" appears in a bill passed on June 25, 1886: Whoever induces any person under the age of eighteen years of chaste life and conversation to have unlawful sexual intercourse shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison, common jail, or house of correction not exceeding three years or by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars or by both fine and imprisonment in the jail or house of correction. Note that this language is substantially similar to the language that is currently in effect; the main changes are that the penalty was changed a little, and that the phrase "chaste life and conversation"1 was replaced with "chaste life". Combined with the 1836 law found by user6726, this narrows it down to a range of about 50 years. 1 "Conversation" in the above context appears to be an archaic sense of the word meaning one's "manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society; behaviour, mode or course of life."
united-states I really can't think of any influences of Scots Law on U.S. law. In all of the areas where I know Scots law to be distinctive vis-a-vis English common law, the U.S. has not followed the Scots law model, and I have never seen a Scottish precedent cited in a court opinion in the U.S. while I have seen many English ones cited (with one narrow exception noted below). For example, while the Scots Law concept of a criminal trial verdict of &quot;not proven&quot; rather than &quot;not guilty&quot; has been discussed by academics and policymakers, to the best of my knowledge, no U.S. jurisdiction has adopted a &quot;not proven&quot; verdict option. Two U.S. states experimented with non-unanimous verdicts, something that U.S. law has since disavowed, but so far as I know, this decision was not borrowed from Scottish practice. In Louisiana, it was a calculated strategy to make it easier to convict black defendants after slavery was abolished. No U.S. jurisdiction has ever had petite juries of 15 in any kind of case. Scotland and the U.S. are now aligned in being jurisdictions that have jury trials of ordinary personal injury cases, something that very few countries do, but in the U.S. case, the right to a jury trial in personal injury cases flows from English law practice that England later modified while the U.S. did not, rather than from copying Scots law. Scotland still has many common law crimes, which U.S. jurisdictions are in the final stages of completely abolishing (most have done so, but there are a few partial stragglers). Similarly, U.S. criminal law, unlike Scots Law, has never required corroboration for a criminal conviction, although, of course, it is desirable to have it if possible. The Scottish Court system has much more specialization of court jurisdiction than almost all U.S. jurisdictions do, although U.S. jurisdictions vary in the extent to which they have specialized courts, and of course, no U.S. jurisdiction has had religious courts since the early 1800s before the church was disestablished in New England. While the U.S. merged law and equity for the most part, as did most common law jurisdictions, the distinction still has a significant residual effect that differs from Scots law which never fully separated the two. Equity is still taught as a distinct elective class in many U.S. law schools to this day. Perhaps the only area I can think of where there has arguably been some borrowing from Scots Law has been in the jurisdiction and choice of law analysis applied to marriage and divorce questions. It used to be easier to get married in Scotland than in England, and in cases of parental or religious opposition, couples sometimes went to Scotland to get married and left courts to sort out whether that was legitimate after the fact. This is an area where U.S. case law sometimes referred to how those issues were resolved in the cases of disputes over whether English or Scottish laws related to marriage formation and marriage dissolution should apply. I don't know the law of mineral rights well enough to describe the provenance of some of its doctrines accurately, but there are some similarities between the Scottish concepts applicable to the structure of mineral rights, when they are reserved in a patent from the sovereign of the surface rights to property (as many key mineral rights in Scotland were starting in the early modern period), that may have some Scots Law influence. The lack of Scots Law impact on U.S. law despite significant Scottish immigration to the U.S. is to some extent a function of U.S. immigration history. Scottish immigration that was early enough to have an impact on the legal system's larger outlines was mostly &quot;Scotch-Irish&quot; (i.e. Protestants from the Scottish borderlands, often traditionally herders or subsistence farmers, who were ancestral to the current Irish Protestants of Northern Ireland), who were lower to middle class, who engaged mostly in rural subsistence farming in Appalachia and the rural American South, and were not prominent in commerce and were subordinate to an English elite (the Episcopal Church of English origins has always a higher socioeconomic status church in the U.S. than the Presbyterian Church which has Scottish roots). By the time middle class Scottish people engaged in commerce and inclined to participate in formal law and politics arrived in the U.S., a wave of migration reflected in the American West mostly from the mid-1800s as part of the gold rush and homesteading movements, the die was largely already cast with respect to major framework level issues in the U.S. legal system. The map below partially obscures this history to some extent, however, because many people with Scotch-Irish ancestry now identify for census purposes as &quot;American.&quot; Many anthropologists attribute the &quot;culture of honor&quot; of the American South and Appalachia to a Scotch-Irish ancestral source, and this culture of honor surely did influence the character of various U.S. legal doctrines and legislative developments in the U.S., but it did not involve direct borrowings from Scots Law, and indeed, it can be seen as deriving from a subculture of people for whom formal legal institutions in Scotland were sufficiently weak in practical application that they had little impact on their lives. Honestly, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that there have been more borrowings from Australian legal innovations (especially in probate and real property), and from civil law systems (for example, the law of good faith and fair dealing, and the law of unjust enrichment), than there have been from Scots law. I would be happy to be corrected if someone is aware of a counterexample, however.
I am not a lawyer and I have never even been to the UK. You will not go to prison if your neighbor's dog attacks you and it dies as a result of you defending yourself. You might go to prison and/or owe the owner damages if: You are somewhere you do not technically have a right to be. It can be shown you could have retreated from harm but chose instead to stand your ground. The force you used was deemed excessive - it showed intent to harm the dog more than necessary to protect yourself You contributed to the confrontation in a way that a reasonable person would think might cause trouble You might be able to protect yourself from problems by: taking pictures or videos of the dog behaving badly or aggressively note dates and times when you observe the dog behaving badly or aggressively formally contact the dog's owner with your concerns and/or evidence in which you assert your rights to access the areas you walk through and your right to defend yourself in the event that you are attacked by the dog if possible, change your route or schedule to avoid the problem entirely Good luck
germany In Germany this is a solved matter: Killing on request is illegal. Killing someone to consume them can be Mord. Eating human remains is illegal, even with consent of the dead. Why do we know this? Because Armin Meiwes did exactly that: he was involved in killing Bernd-Jürgen Armando Brandes, who wanted to die, and ate the remains of him. He currently is incarcerated for life due to the conviction of Mord. This is because he was found to have killed for his own sexual gratification - one of the factors that can turn an unlawful killing/Totschlag (§ 212 StGB) (~manslaughter) into Mord (§ 211 StGB) (~murder 1st degree) under german law. Consuming the remains of a human body is, as the courts found, Störung der Totenruhe under § 168 StgB (disturbing the rest of human remains). It is not possible to consent to being eaten, as you can not give your body to anything but research or medical education legally and you have to be buried in a designated graveyard.
I was initially going to vote to close this as a political rather than a legal question, however, I think there is scope for separating out the two dimensions. Our society makes a distinction between children and adults by giving them different legal rights, obligations and protections. If you think about it, there are a lot of things beyond sexual activity where the law does this: voting, drinking, military service, compulsory schooling, legal culpability etc. What things are subject to legal restriction is a political distinction. Now, there is no reason politically why these laws could not have been drafted to say "children can do this, adults can do that" and leave it to the courts to decide who is a "child" and who is an "adult". Biologically and emotionally people reach maturity at different ages so this is perfectly sensible. It might even be more just. However, justice is only one thing that we require of our legal system. Among the others are certainty and efficiency. Providing a bright line based on birth date gives certainty. Not requiring the court to deal with this on a case-by-case basis increases efficiency - justice is not free. This is why jurisdictions use age as a proxy for adulthood. As to why they choose any particular age, that is a political question.
Is this realistic? Yes. The dramatic performance plays out in the same way that it would in the U.S. Court system. The actual killing of the wife would be 'legal', so can he be charged for murder for something that has been done legally, only because they can prove is intent to kill her before that? Especially since he has already been acquitted of that fact. Mostly, this is an issue of causation and not double jeopardy. From a double jeopardy perspective, the crime of murder is not complete until the person dies, and they have not be tried for murder, so this is a different crime that had not occurred until after the attempted murder trial was over. Causation Issues Even if the immediate cause of the wife's death is withdrawal of life support, the shooting could still be a legally sufficient cause of the wife's death. For example, suppose that you shoot someone and the hospital can't give the victim a blood transfusion because the victim has blood type O- (universal donor) which can only receive blood from other people with blood type O-, and the hospital, due to negligence on the part of a hospital administrator, has run out out of type O- blood. The fact that the victim would not have died if the hospital has not negligently failed to have type O- blood on hand does not provide a defense to murder on the part of the person who shot her. While terminating life support is "legal" it also constitutes a non-judicial finding with legal effect on the part of the person authorizing it and the physicians signing off on the decision, the further medical care would have been futile and that the person whose life support was terminated was already dead in key material respects, even though they would not be dead for purposes of a murder charge until life support is terminated. When death is a natural and foreseeable result of action that causes physical harm, the death is caused by the act that causes the physical harm. Something else that causes death would have to be a "superseding cause" and not just an additional cause of death. Thus, the fact that life support was terminated legally does not mean that she cannot be a murder victim. Indeed, many murder victims are people who are on life support for some period of time and then have that life support terminated because it is futile to continue medical care and the person is already "brain dead" or something equivalent to that. Collateral Estoppel Issues Double jeopardy does carry with it a related concept of "collateral estoppel" which provides that facts necessarily decided in one criminal case cannot be decided differently in a subsequent, related criminal case in some circumstances. But, collateral estoppel applies only when the facts in the prior criminal case were necessarily decided on the merits in the prior criminal case. Acquittal of criminal charged does not necessarily include a determination that someone was innocent of the charges. The fact that he was acquitted of attempted murder does not mean that the jury found that he didn't attempt or intend to murder her. In particular, a dismissal of criminal charges as a result of a technicality that excluded evidence related to an element of the crime for which there was an acquittal, is not a determination on the merits that a particular element of a crime was actually absent, so it would not be binding in the subsequent criminal case for murder. An acquittal does not mean that every element of the prior criminal charges was found not to be present. Collateral estoppel arising from the double jeopardy right, in contrast, might be a ground for dismissal of the murder case, if the man's primary (and perhaps only) defense to the attempted murder case had been that he had established the affirmative defense that someone else committed the murder, or that he had an alibi that made it impossible for him to have committed the murder. Then, the jury would have found on the merits that this defense, equally applicable to the murder case, had already been established.
In the United States, blasphemy is really not a crime even if it severely offends certain people and tends to cause them to want to riot and kill the person who offends them. Most Americans who are familiar with the law and the U.S. Constitution strongly support this policy and think it is obviously right. Not every country interprets its freedom of speech laws (if it even has freedom of speech laws) in this way. For example, Canada has a law against blasphemy, as do almost all countries which have an official state religion (which is called the "establishment" of a religion). Also many countries have seemingly contradictory constitutional provisions and courts have to resolve their relative priority. For example, many Muslim countries have constitutions that simultaneously contain a right to freedom of speech and a provision that says that Sharia law is the supreme law of the land (e.g. both Afghanistan and Iraq recently enacted constitutions that say both of those things). A court could decide that the Sharia law provision prevails over freedom of speech in the event that the two conflict, or could reach the opposite conclusion. Nothing on the face of a constitution like that will tell the court how to resolve the issue. Many other countries have laws against intentionally and publicly offending someone's religious beliefs, which is similar to, but not the same as, a blasphemy law. Blasphemy, narrowly interpreted, means saying something that contradicts the doctrines of the nation's official religion, without regard to whether it is offensive - so, for example, saying that Mary the Mother of Jesus got pregnant the ordinary way, rather than having a virgin birth, would be blasphemy even if no one was offended by you saying that in a country where Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism or the Anglican Church was the official religion. A narrow Blasphemy law offends the idea of separation of church and state because it makes the government the ultimate determiner of what the doctrines of the nation's official religion says and allows a government to have an official religion. It is also notable that there are two parts to the freedom of religion in the United States. One part is the "free exercise clause" which allows people to practice the religion of their choice. The other part is the "establishment clause" which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another or even favoring being religious over being not religious. The "free exercise clause" is similar to the stance that the Koran takes towards "People of the Book" but applied to any kind of religious belief not just Jews and Christians. Many conservatives in the United States are strong supporters of the free exercise clause, but think that the establishment clause should only apply to the federal government (so the state and local governments can establish a religion). Other conservatives think that the establishment clause should only prevent the government from preferring one denomination of Christianity over another denomination, even though the drafters of the constitution and courts ever since then have made clear that this was not the intent of the establishment clause. Article 11 of the Treaty of Tripoli, signed by the President and ratified by the Senate so that it took effect in 1797, just six years after the Bill of Rights was adopted, for example, specifically noted that the freedom of religion in the United States included Muslims. Many countries have a freedom of religion that protects free exercise but does not have an establishment clause. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights similarly protects only free exercise and does not prohibit governments from having an established religion. Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights is usually not enforceable in the courts unless a country decides that it will enforce it. It does not usually have the effect of causing the laws of a country to be invalidated the way that an unconstitutional law would be invalidated. Put another way, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and most other international human rights treaties are usually determined by courts to be not "self-executing". So, it is up to the legislative process in a particular country to decide how to implement human rights if it does so at all. In contrast, Europe has a treaty that is part of the Council of Europe organization with similar provisions, that is binding on member states even if it violates their laws (i.e. it is "self-executing").