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The 1580 Political Ordinance of the States of Holland and West Friesland: Certain Examples of its Influence in the English-Speaking World
78-88Views:195The present study deals with certain influences the 1580 Political Ordinance of the States of Holland and West Friesland had in the English-speaking world, specifically in relation to the Plymouth Colony in the present-day Commonwealth of Massachusetts and South Africa. Regarding the former, there is a survey of the introduction of the institution of civil marriage by the Pilgrims at the Plymouth Colony and the Dutch background to this particular development. In relation to South Africa, there is an analysis of the lack of intestacy inheritance between spouses in that country in the past due to the system of inheritance rooted in the 1580 Political Ordinance, and the changes that took place in connection to this with the passing of time.
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The Criminalisation of Active Bribery of Public Officials: A New KOL Research in Hungary
9-29Views:259The aim of the three-year project “Novelties of Criminal Law in Legal Consciousness” was to measure the knowledge and attitudes of lay people concerning criminal law including regulatory novelties with a questionnaire-based survey. In this paper, the authors analyse the responses to questions related to active bribery of public officials. The research has verified our hypothesis that the average person has a fragmented knowledge even about this sector of criminal law. However, this is partly due to the fact that the respondents – compared to the differentiation of the legal regulation – usually have schematic knowledge on the topic. The answers were strongly influenced by attitudes towards this type of criminality. It was not substantiated, however, that this knowledge is substantially affected by socio-economic factors, by media consumption or by encountering criminality. Our hypothesis regarding the novelty of regulation has been only partially proven: there are more than three times more people whose answers reflect the old regulation than the new one. However, this was not necessarily due to actual knowledge of the older regulation, but rather to the fact that it was more in line with respondents insensitivity to legal distinctions.
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Knowledge of Law in the Hungarian Population Today and a Half Century Ago – A Comparative Analysis based on Kálmán Kulcsár’s Empirical Survey of 1965
11-28Views:248Knowledge of law is certainly one component of legal culture. Due to the support of the Hungarian Research Funds (OTKA) the authors of this paper carried out a comprehensive empirical analysis of this issue in Hungary. In doing so they strongly relied on Kálmán Kulcsár’s findings and insights stemming from his pathbreaking studies half a century ago.
The empirical study was carried out by the Szonda Ipsos Market and Opinion Research Institute in the framework of an omnibus questionnaire survey with a random sample of 1000 people in 2013. Thirteen questions essentially similar to certain questions used by Kulcsár in 1965 (for instance: Have you ever read a bill or an act? Have you ever participated in a judicial process? Who or which body enacts a bill in Hungary?) were posed in order to provide a possibility for the comparison of the actual results and those of Kulcsár.
We found that the general level of knowledge of law had increased substantially in the past decades. Knowledge related to constitutional law is the prominent example of this growth and it can definitely be coupled with the functioning of the democratic political system in the last 25 years. However, except from constitutional law, the growth of legal knowledge is due almost solely to the increased level of education and not a generally improved legal consciousness of the society.
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The main factors influencing the level of the knowledge of law
71-95Views:202The paper deals with the level of legal knowledge among the Hungarian population measured with a representative survey asking questions regarding the knowledge of certain constitutional, civil, administrative and procedural legal rules releant in everyday life. Our findings are compared to a research carried out in 1965, using the same questions. Furthermore we analysed the relationship of knowledge level as a dependent variable with (i) socio-demographic (gender, age, education, etc.), (ii) media consumption (some 30 written, electronic and internet-based items), (iii) interaction with the legal system (read a law, consulted with a lawyer, participated in a trial) and (iv) civic activity. We found that the level of education is crucial, and interaction with the legal system has some additional significant impact, too. All other independent variables seem to have less significance or no impact at all. The relative strength of explanatory variables has largely changed in the past decades and in some cases even the direction of impact altered (for example women seem to be more educated about the law nowadays, in a sharp contrast to the 1965 data.)
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The Effects of Anthropological Concept of the Legislator on the Interpretation of Law – The Conclusions of a Hungarian Research
73-84Views:111The paper tries to answer the question whether the principle of ’presumption of innocence’ is applied appropriately and consistently in the practice of Hungarian judges. In 2010 we studied the judicial activity of a chosen number of Hungarian judges by analyzing the text of roughly 300 judgements of Hungarian courts and by carrying out an on-line survey among Hungarian judges. As a primary result we could identify some major deficiencies concerning the application of the principle. The other lesson we learnt from the research is that serious principles play their part only if the legislator at the drafting of the law takes the actual knowledge and skills of the law applier into account.