Browsing by Subject "Criminal law"

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Between protection and punishment : children, sexual crimes and law in Buenos Aires, 1853-1912
(2015-12) Ogden, Julia Grace; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; Levine, Philippa; Brown, Jonathan; Rodriguez, Julia
This dissertation examines how “children” emerged as a discrete social group through the codification of penal law in Argentina, and the prosecution of sexual deviance in the criminal courts of Buenos Aires. Between 1853 and 1912, as lawmakers drafted, and redrafted, a national penal code, they fundamentally altered the meaning of illicit sexuality from colonial legal antecedents. Spanish laws had punished the acts of rape, deflowering, incest, and sodomy because they defiled female chastity or offended God. The national penal code censured these actions when committed with individuals younger than a certain age. This redefinition of criminal sexuality institutionalized the notion of childhood “innocence,” and extended protection to youth until the age of sixteen. An analysis of 230 criminal court cases reveals how, as a result of these legal changes, age became the deciding factor in the prosecution of sexual crimes, and judicial authorities began to consider, and treat, lower-class girls and boys as “children.” This shift in perspective caused magistrates to extend state protection to poor youth who, due to elite assumptions of appropriate behavior and sexuality, had been previously excluded. Despite new visions of childhood, however, the perpetuation of cultural and ideological biases among judicial authoritis ensured that some individuals continued to exist outside the realm of official preservation. This work demonstrates how social boundaries were redrawn in the modern period, and argues for the central importance of the law in the process of state formation in Latin America. In doing so, it provides important contributions to literature on crime, childhood, and sexuality. The creation of a protected social group characterized by age reconfigured traditional associations that had been drawn along gender and class lines. Illuminating this process provides an alternative vision of the liberal state. The hesitancy of the judiciary to intervene in the sexual lives of lower-class families recasts the dominant historiographical view of governments eager to intrude into the private sphere. Additionally, the protection of poor children in the courts reveals how turn-of-the-century elites not only criminalized poor youth but also began to protect them prior to the emergence of the welfare state.
Furtive Blackness : on being in and outside of law
(2021-05-05) Wilson, Tabias Olajuawon; Marshall, Stephen H.; Thompson, Shirley; Perry, Imani; Livermon, Xavier; Arroyo-Martinez, Jossianna
This dissertation is comprised of three chapters; Furtive Blackness: On Blackness and Being (“Furtive Blackness”), The Strict Scrutiny of Black and BlaQueer Life (“Strict Scrutiny”) and Sexual Profiling: BlaQueer Furtivity. It takes a fresh approach to both criminal law and constitutional law; particularly as they apply to African descended peoples in the United States. This is an intervention as to the description of the terms of Blackness in light of the social order but, also, an exposure of the failures and gaps of law. This is why the categories as we have them are inefficient to account for Black life. The way legal scholars have encountered and understood the language of law has been wholly insufficient to understand how law encounters human life. This work is about the hermeneutics of law. While I center case history and Black letter law, I am also arguing explicitly that the law has a dynamic life beyond the courtroom, a life of constructing and dissembling Black life. Together, these essays and exercises in legal philosophy are pointing toward a new method of thinking about law, a method that makes central the material reality of the Black—and BlaQueer—in black letter law.
Protecting Argentina : lawmaking, children and sexual crimes in Buenos Aires, 1853-1921
(2011-05) Rahe, Julia Grace; Twinam, Ann, 1946-; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia
"Protecting Argentina" explores how the definitions of sexual crimes (rape, seduction, abduction and the corruption of minors) changed in Argentine penal law during the process of congressional codification between 1853 and 1921. It contextualizes an in-depth analysis of legal definitions within the legislative process and the shifting ideologies of criminology that influenced it. It argues that, as nineteenth century positivist criminology replaced Enlightenment-inspired "Classical" criminology, the meaning and foundational presupposition of these crimes shifted from those of their colonial predecessors. Where in colonial times "Acts of lechery" were criminal when committed against chaste women, in the republican era, the law punished "Crimes against honesty" when the victims were children. Liberal lawmakers defined these sexual acts primarily by the age of the victim and secondarily by the violence used in their perpetration. The year 1903 was a watershed in this process, as it marked Positivism's displacement of "Classical" criminology as the guiding ideology of criminal law. These conclusions suggest there were substantive correlations between elite campaigns to ensure the future of the nation by saving children and the codification of national criminal law undertaken by Congress. As argentine elites began to witness what they perceived to be the negative effects of modernization, rapid population growth, industrialization and the accompanying increase in crime, they sought to ensure the future of the nation through "child saving" campaigns. The increasingly age-based definitions of sexual crimes, which aimed to protect young victims, fit within the broader state-led campaign to protect future citizens. "Protecting Argentina" therefore suggests that historians should consider legislative processes of state building as forming an integral part of turn-of-the-century nationalist projects in Latin America. Tying together positivist penology, nationalist discourse, and congressional codification, this report places children at the center of Argentine elites' attempts to ensure the future of the nation through the protection of children.