History of the Los Angeles Police Department

The Los Angeles Police Department was formed in 1869, and has since become the third-largest law enforcement agency in the United States. They have been involved in various events in history, such as the Black Dahlia murder case, and the Rampart scandal.
Early history.
During the California Gold Rush, Los Angeles was known for its violence, gambling and "vice" and lack of effective civil law enforcement. It was reputed to have the highest murder rate in the United States at the time and the countryside was infested with bandits. Most men went armed with pistols and knives and lynching was often the method used to dispose of lawbreakers, courts being few and ineffective. The first specific Los Angeles police force was founded in 1853 as the Los Angeles Rangers, a volunteer California State Militia company that assisted the existing County Sheriff in enforcing the law until disbanded in 1857. The Rangers were supplemented from 1853 by the Los Angeles Guards, a local volunteer California State Militia company that lasted until 1880 and by the Los Angeles City Guards (1855–1861). The first paid police force was created in 1869, when six officers were hired to serve under City Marshal William C. Warren. Warren was shot by one of his deputies, Joe Dye, in 1870 in a quarrel over a reward. To replace Warren, the newly created Board of Police Commissioners selected Jacob F. Gerkens. The latter was replaced within a year by saloon owner Emil Harris, the second of fifteen police chiefs from 1876 to 1889.
The first chief to remain in office for any time was John M. Glass; appointed in 1889, he served for eleven years and was a driving force for increased professionalism in the force. By 1900, there were 70 officers, one for every 1,500 people; in 1903, with the start of the Civil Service, this force was increased to 200, although training was not introduced until 1916. The rapid turnover of chiefs was renewed in the 1900s as the office became increasingly politicized; from 1900 to 1923 there were sixteen different chiefs. The longest-lasting was Charles E. Sebastian, who served from 1911 to 1915 before going on to become mayor.
In 1910 the department promoted the first sworn female police officer with full powers in the United States, Alice Stebbins Wells. Georgia Ann Robinson became the first African-American female police officer in the country in 1916.
World Wars.
During World War I the force became involved with federal offenses, and much of the force was organized into a special Home Guard. In the postwar period, the department became highly corrupt along with much of the city government; this state lasted until the late 1930s. Two police chiefs did work within a mandate for anti-corruption and reform. August Vollmer laid the ground for future improvements but served for only a single year. James E. Davis served from April 1, 1926 to December 29, 1929 and from August 10, 1933 to November 18, 1938. In his first term he fired almost a fifth of the force for bad conduct, and instituted extended firearms training and also the dragnet system of policing. In his second term Davis instituted a "Red Squad" to attack Communists and their offices.
With the replacement of Mayor Frank L. Shaw in 1938, the city gained a reformist mayor in Fletcher Bowron. He forced dozens of city commissioners out, as well as more than 45 LAPD officers. Bowron also appointed the first African American and the first woman to the Police Commission. The modernizer Arthur C. Hohmann was made chief in 1939 and resigned in 1941 after a strike at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, in which he refused to use the LAPD as strikebreakers.
During World War II, under Police Chief Clemence B. Horrall, the force was heavily depleted by the demands of the armed forces; new recruits were given only six weeks training (twelve was normal). Despite the attempts to maintain numbers the police could do little to control the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. War Emergency personnel were given a "WE" designation with their badge numbers to distinguish them from other officers.
Among the department's more notorious cases of the Horrall years was the January 15, 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia.
Horrall and Assistant Chief Joe Reed resigned in 1949 under threat of a grand jury investigation related to the Brenda Allen scandal. Several of Horrall and Reed's more enduring actions, among others, were to approve a radio show about the LAPD titled "Dragnet" in the same year, with Jack Webb starring in the program, and the 1946 founding of the LAPD's secret "Gangster Squad" aimed to stop the rising threat of the American Mafia and organized crime (led by the local Los Angeles crime family) in the city.
1950–1965.
Horrall was replaced by a retired Marine general, William A. Worton, who acted as interim chief until 1950, when William H. Parker was chosen in tight competition with Thad Brown. Parker advocated police professionalism and autonomy from civilian administration, especially as concerned internal affairs. The Bloody Christmas scandal in 1951 led to calls for civilian accountability and an end to police brutality in the city itself.
Parker served until his death in 1966 from a heart attack, the longest period in office of any chief. The motto "To Protect and to Serve" was introduced in 1955. During this period, the LAPD set the standards of professionalism echoed in the contemporaneous TV series "Dragnet" and "Adam-12". The most serious challenge in this period was the 1965 Watts riots following accusations of mistreatment and police brutality toward minority communities by the City and the LAPD. For six days, buildings and businesses were looted and set on fire, and sniping also took place before the California Army National Guard were deployed to assist the overwhelmed LAPD in restoring order. Over 34 people died in the Watts riot and $40 million in damage was caused as almost 1,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Most of the physical damage was confined to white-owned businesses that were said to have caused resentment in the neighborhood due to perceived unfairness.
Edward M. Davis as chief.
Parker was succeeded by Thad Brown as acting chief in 1966, followed by Thomas Reddin in 1967. Following an interim term by Chief Roger E. Murdock, the outspoken Edward M. Davis became chief in 1969; Chief Davis introduced a number of modern programs aimed at community policing, special street gang control units, as well as the SWAT unit (1972); he retired in 1978.
The street gang control units were structured by Deputy Chief Louis Sporrer, who commanded Operations South Bureau, which was the Headquarters for the South Central Los Angeles police divisions. In 1972 street gangs were becoming a growing problem and initially were made-up of the best known gang structures of the Crips and the Bloods. A Gang Intelligence Unit was set up in 77th Street Division headed by a Sergeant Robert Michael. A uniformed team was set up and given the acronym of TRASH, or Total Resources Against Street Hoodlums, headed by Sergeant Beno Hernandez. It was from this time on that the flattering term gang was dropped and the term "hoodlums" was adopted.
Intelligence indicated that each gang had a "leader", a few close "associates" and follower "acquaintances" and when the leader was removed by arrest and detention that crime in the group's area of control went down significantly; when the leader returned however, crime returned to its previous level. To address this phenomenon, and to give courts a better understanding of whom they were dealing with, a joint task force of police, probation, parole, schools, and others formed an entity with an acronym of DDCP, or Disposition Data Coordination Project. This entity was housed in the South Bureau, and coordinated by the Intelligence Sergeant Michael. DDCP was a pre-sentence gathering of reputation information in the community, allowed under California law to be considered by the Court.
The DDCP was a repository of sources for the court to consider in its sentencing disposition. Soon however, it was dubbed the Alpha File by several attorneys and the ACLU filed suit against the City of Los Angeles. The DDCP project was later terminated at the discretion of the city. At about the same time complaints began being made by activists outside the City and South Bureau area, that TRASH was demeaning to the group members. Chief Sporrer renamed the units CRASH, or Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, and it remained operational as it had been before the name change. These police specialists are still policing today in the same manner as they began in 1972, and still under the CRASH acronym.
Also during the term of Chief Davis, the LAPD pioneered tactics and procedures that would serve as the blueprints of modern community-policing. Known as the "basic car plan" or "team policing" the department sought to build strong ties to the community through the permanent assignment and deployment of teams of officers—patrol, detectives, and supervisors—to identified geographic areas. This allowed the officers to develop a working knowledge of their community and fostered familiarity, trust and respect on the part of the community toward its police officers.
Under Davis the LAPD and its vice squad were known for active policing against gays. Zealous officers, led by Detective Lloyd Martin, are purported to have dangled two youths over a cliff to try to make him reveal names of pedophile ring. On April 10, 1976 over a hundred officers, with Davis present, raided a charitable "slave auction" event and bragged to reporters that they had freed the slaves. Dozens of men were detained on charges of violating an 1899 anti-slavery statute, but the expensive raid was criticized by the city council and no one was convicted.
1978–2002.
The successor to Davis, Daryl F. Gates, came into office just as Proposition 13 reduced the department's budget, cutting police numbers to less than 7,000 in seven years, just as drug and gang crime reached unprecedented highs. To combat the rising tide of gang-related violence, Gates introduced Operation Hammer in 1987, which resulted in an unprecedented number of arrests, mostly of black American and Hispanic youths. Gates retired in 1992, just after the Rodney King-related 1992 Los Angeles riots in April and May and the damaging Christopher Commission Report, and was replaced by Willie L. Williams, the fiftieth chief, the first African-American officer to hold the office and the first non-internal appointee for almost 40 years. In 1997, Williams was replaced by Bernard Parks, during whose term the LAPD was rocked by the Rampart Division/CRASH corruption scandal. In 1997, one of the biggest challenges for the LAPD and LAPD SWAT was the North Hollywood shootout in which two bank robbers armed with automatic rifles and wearing body armor shot twelve responding officers and two civilians. The suspects were eventually defeated by SWAT units after a gun battle that lasted nearly an hour.
In November 1997, the Department did something for the first time in forty years in taking over another police department—the MTA Transit Police. Originally touted as a merger process, this became a political football with members of the City Council fighting the mayor's "one city—one police department" plan to eliminate all of the smaller, specialized police forces (Transit Police, Airport Police, School Police, Park Rangers, etc.). In the end, only about 130 of the originally slated 200 officers of the MTA Transit Police came to the LAPD, with about the same number going to the LASD (Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department). After less than five years, the MTA removed LAPD from the transit policing contract it had established with LAPD and LASD, and LASD was given the entire MTA contract. As of 2006, only 96 of those officers remained with the LAPD.
In 2002, after a loss of approximately 1,700 officers in two years, mostly to other Southern California police departments and in the face of an unprecedented homicide rate, Mayor Hahn moved to have the Board of Police Commissioners refuse to accept Parks' application for another five-year term. Parks appealed to the City Council who refused to take up his cause. Parks initially threatened a lawsuit, but thought better of it and considered a run for City Council in the near future instead. Parks promptly left office, several months before his five-year term was up. Former Deputy Chief Martin Pomeroy was selected as an interim Chief until a permanent replacement could be found. Also in 2002, voters in the City passed the Proposition Q—Citywide Public Safety Bond to expand, renovate and replace existing police and fire facilities. This $600 million bond program included replacement of the West Valley, Rampart, Hollenbeck, and Harbor Police Stations; adding a new Emergency Operations Center; replacing the Parker Center Jail; adding a new Operations Valley Bureau/Valley Traffic Division; and adding two new Area Police Stations—20th (Olympic Area) and 21st (Topanga Area) Police Stations.
William J. Bratton as Chief.
Chief William J. Bratton came to the LAPD after having prior experience as Chief of Police for the NYPD, the NY City Transit Police, the Boston Police and the MBTA Transit Police. Bratton came in a manner very different from his most recent outsider predecessor, Chief Parks. Prior to his arrival, Bratton requested all captains and above submit resumes and biographies for consideration in his new administration. Bratton made his initial goals to fully implement the Federal Consent decree (left from the Parks administration), to implement a dramatic reduction in Part I crime and to create a world class counter-terrorism Bureau within LAPD (during Parks' tenure, a year after 9/11, officers still had no WMD training nor equipment; however, Parks had successfully implemented a "no US flag pin" policy for wear on officer's uniforms). Bratton later added community oriented policing to his list of goals. In 2005, the LAPD began showing action-packed mini-movies online and at movie theaters to promote recruiting. The movies feature real LAPD officers and what they do. Bratton retired as Chief of the LAPD on October 31, 2009 and became the chief executive officer of Altegrity Security Consulting, a private security firm based in Virginia.
On May 17, 2005, Los Angeles voters rejected a proposal (Proposition A) that would have merged LAPD and the Los Angeles Airport Police. The argument against this proposal was that officers of the Los Angeles Airport Police had more extensive training in airport law enforcement and security operations. LAPD officers would have needed more training in this new function. At the request of Airport Police, LAPD officers are assigned on an overtime basis to security checkpoints in the terminals at LAX. This assignment became available to LAPD officers and supervisory personnel due to staff shortages at the Airport Police.
In 2006, the Department temporarily relocated two LAPD stations, Hollenbeck and Harbor, to Temporary Stations, while the existing stations were demolished and new ones built on the same sites. Also in 2006, a longtime goal of the Department, to replace Parker Center, began moving towards fruition with demolition of the old Caltrans building at 2nd/ Spring Streets to make way for a new Police Administration Building. The Department broke ground for two new Community Police Stations as well as a replacement of three older stations. The groundbreaking for the 20th (Olympic Area) Police Station, was on May 4, 2006. Groundbreaking for the 21st (Topanga Area) Police Station, was on May 11, 2006.
Replacement Rampart Station was built on the site of the former Central Receiving Hospital (police hospital) that had been located on 6th Street and Valencia Street. As a sidenote, exteriors from Rampart division on Rampart and Benton were filmed for the "Adam-12" television series. The department does not permit the interiors of police stations filmed for motion picture purposes, so interiors were filmed at Universal Studios in Universal City, California.
The 21st (Topanga Area) Police Station opened on January 4, 2009 and was formed from parts of the existing West Valley Area and Devonshire Area in the Operations-Valley Bureau. The 20th Area Police Station area will be formed from portions of Wilshire, Hollywood and Rampart Police Station areas. Three additional police stations are planned for additions in the next ten years (2007–2016), one each for the South, West and Central Bureaus of the Department.
In 2006, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa initiated gradual increases in trash collection fees paid by property owners to hire about 1,000 LAPD officers over the next five years.
On February 7, 2008, when LAPD responded to a call that an emotionally disturbed man killed three of his family members, the man shot two SWAT officers, one of whom was killed. Officer Randal Simmons was the first SWAT officer to be killed in the line of duty since the founding of SWAT.
2009–present.
On November 17, 2009, Charles L. Beck was sworn in by Mayor Villaraigosa to succeed William J. Bratton as the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. A 32-year veteran of the department, he is known for commanding and rehabilitating the Rampart Division after the Rampart Scandal.
Central Receiving Hospital.
The Los Angeles Police Department ran an emergency hospital for 102 years, near downtown central Los Angeles. It was called the Central Receiving Hospital, and was always in a police building that also housed other police functions, until 1957 when it was moved to a purpose-built police building. It existed from 1868 to 1970. The Central Receiving Hospital originated as a sanitarium sited in Chávez Ravine. It originally housed patients dying from incurable infectious diseases, in particular smallpox. In the 1880s it moved into the back of the Central Police Station, and acted as a police first aid station. Over the next 80 years it was housed in a series of three other police buildings: the new Central Police Station (1896), the Georgia Street Police Station (1927), and finally the Central Receiving Hospital building on Loma Drive (1957). It was started to provide hospice care, but switched to providing emergency care with its move into the Central Police Station in the 1880s. It was the first public hospital to provide emergency care in Los Angeles.


Syvert Omundsen Eeg

Syvert Omundsen Eeg (21 August 1757 – 20 November 1838) was a Norwegian farmer and Sea captain. He served as a representative at the Norwegian Constitutional Assembly in 1814.
Syvert Omundsen Eeg was born in Søgne in Vest-Agder, Norway. He worked as both a farmer and a shipmaster. He signed up as a seaman in Kristiansand in 1796. He sailed aboard the "Strandmaagen" and the brig "Anne Marie". Later he was skipper of the galleons "Emanuel" and "Peter". He was held captive in England as a result of the British embargo of Norway during the Napoleonic wars.
Syvert Omundsen Eeg was married in 1782 to Anne Salvesdatter (1757-1842). The couple lived on the farm Eeg ("Gården Eik in Søgne"). They were the parents of eight children, of which only five survived childhood.
He was elected to the Norwegian Constituent Assembly in 1814, representing the constituency of Mandals Amt (now Vest-Agder). Together with his fellow representatives, Erich Haagensen Jaabech and Osmund Andersen Lømsland, during the negotiations at Eidsvoll, he supported the position of the union party ("Unionspartiet").


Imperial immediacy

Imperial immediacy ( or ') was a privileged constitutional and political status rooted in German feudal law under which the Imperial estates of the Holy Roman Empire such as Imperial cities, prince-bishoprics and secular principalities, and individuals such as the Imperial knights, were declared free from the authority of any local lord and placed under the direct ("immediate", in the sense of "without an intermediary") authority of the Holy Roman Emperor, and later of the institutions of the Empire such as the Diet ('), the Imperial Chamber of Justice and the Aulic Council.
The granting of immediacy began in the Early Middle Ages, and for the immediate bishops, abbots, and cities, then the main beneficiaries of that status, immediacy could be exacting and often meant being subjected to the fiscal, military, and hospitality demands of their overlord, the Emperor. However, with the gradual exit of the Emperor from the centre stage from the mid-13th century onwards, holders of imperial immediacy eventually found themselves vested with considerable rights and powers previously exercised by the emperor.
As confirmed by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the possession of imperial immediacy came with a particular form of territorial authority known as territorial superiority (' or ' in German and Latin documents of the time). In today's terms, it would be understood as a limited form of sovereignty.
Gradations.
Several immediate estates held the privilege of attending meetings of the ' in person, including an individual vote ('):
They formed the Imperial Estates, together with 99 immediate counts, 40 Imperial prelates (abbots and abbesses), and 50 Imperial Cities, each of whose "banks" only enjoyed a single collective vote (").
Further immediate estates not represented in the " were the Imperial Knights as well as several abbeys and minor localities, the remains of those territories which in the High Middle Ages had been under the direct authority of the Emperor and since then had mostly been given in pledge to the princes.
At the same time, there were classes of "princes" with titular immediacy to the Emperor which they exercised rarely, if at all. For example, the Bishops of Chiemsee, Gurk, and Seckau (Sacken) were practically subordinate to the prince-bishop of Salzburg, but were formally princes of the Empire.
Advantages and disadvantages.
Additional advantages might include the rights to collect taxes and tolls, to hold a market, to mint coins, to bear arms, and to conduct legal proceedings. The last of these might include the so-called "" ("blood justice") through which capital punishment could be administered. These rights varied according to the legal patents granted by the emperor.
As pointed out by Jonathan Israel, the Dutch province of Overijssel in 1528 tried to arrange its submission to Emperor Charles V in his capacity as Holy Roman Emperor rather than as his being the Duke of Burgundy. If successful, that would have evoked Imperial immediacy and would have put Overijssel in a stronger negotiating position, for example given the province the ability to appeal to the Imperial Diet in any debate with Charles. For that reason, the Emperor strongly rejected and blocked Overijssel's attempt.
Disadvantages might include direct intervention by imperial commissions, as happened in several of the southwestern cities after the Schmalkaldic War, and the potential restriction or outright loss of previously held legal patents. Immediate rights might be lost if the Emperor and/or the Imperial Diet could not defend them against external aggression, as occurred in the French Revolutionary wars and the Napoleonic Wars. The Treaty of Lunéville in 1801 required the emperor to renounce all claims to the portions of the Holy Roman Empire west of the Rhine. At the last meeting of the Imperial Diet () in 1802–03, also called the German Mediatisation, most of the free imperial cities and the ecclesiastic states lost their imperial immediacy and were absorbed by several dynastic states.
Problems in understanding the Empire.
The practical application of the rights of immediacy was complex; this makes the history of the Holy Roman Empire particularly difficult to understand, especially for modern historians. Even such contemporaries as Goethe and Fichte called the Empire a monstrosity. Voltaire wrote of the Empire as something neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire, and in comparison to the British Empire, saw its German counterpart as an abysmal failure that reached its pinnacle of success in the early Middle Ages and declined thereafter. Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke described it in the 19th century as having become "a chaotic mess of rotted imperial forms and unfinished territories". For nearly a century after the publication of James Bryce's monumental work "The Holy Roman Empire" (1864), this view prevailed among most English-speaking historians of the Early Modern period, and contributed to the development of the theory of the German past.
A revisionist view popular in Germany but increasingly adopted elsewhere argued that "though not powerful politically or militarily, [the Empire] was extraordinarily diverse and free by the standards of Europe at the time". Pointing out that people like Goethe meant "monster" as a compliment (i.e. 'an astonishing thing'), "The Economist" has called the Empire "a great place to live ... a union with which its subjects identified, whose loss distressed them greatly" and praised its cultural and religious diversity, saying that it "allowed a degree of liberty and diversity that was unimaginable in the neighbouring kingdoms" and that "ordinary folk, including women, had far more rights to property than in France or Spain".
Furthermore, the prestige of the Emperor among the German people outweighed his lack of legal and military authority. One need find no better proof of this than the fact that the constitution of Germany remained little changed for centuries, with hundreds of tiny enclaves co-existing peacefully with much larger and often greedy and militaristic neighbors. Only external factors in form of the French military aggression during the Thirty Years' War and the Revolutionary period served to alter Germany's constitution. Napoleon's overthrow of the Empire in favor of his puppet Confederation of the Rhine was a deep moral blow to many Germans. The cringing attitude of the princes and their avaricious behavior during the mediatizations embarrassed the people and, however much they despised the Empire's weakness, it was still a great and old symbol of Germany. Such symbolism was revived in 1848, when the so-called Provisional Central Power of Germany chose 6 August 1848, the 42nd anniversary of the end of the Empire, as the day the soldiers of Germany should swear oaths of loyalty to the new situation (see Military Parade of August 6th), as well as the German Empire of 1871 referred to as "The Second Reich".


Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack (; 24 May 1901 in Darmstadt – 22 December 1942 in Berlin) was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an extraodinary intellectual family and was originally a humanist, strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the appearance of the Nazis. After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze-Boysen who ran a similar faction. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network, that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. The group was later called the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") by the Abwehr. He and his American-born wife, Mildred Harnack, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942.
Life.
Harnack's family were prominent and academically gifted Protestant Germans from the Baltic region. His father was literary history professor Otto Harnack and his mother was Clara Harnack née Reichau, an artist. Reichau was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig, one of the principal founders of organic chemistry. Harnack's siblings were Falk Harnack, his elder brother, Inge Harnack and Angela Harnack, a violin teacher. Harnack was the nephew of theologian Adolf von Harnack.
In 1919 he became a member of the Freikorps, a volunteer militia. From 1919 to 1923 he studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University, Graz, and Hamburg and became a Doctor of Law in 1924. He completed postgraduate studies in economics at Hamburg and the London School of Economics before being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study at University of Wisconsin. At Madison, Harnack was influenced by the industrial economist and labor historian John R. Commons, seeing his as a mentor.
In 1926, Harnack met American literary historian Mildred Fish, also a student at Wisconsin University, after Harnack wandered into the wrong hall. After a brief friendship and love affair, they were engaged on 6 June 1926 and they married on 7 August 1926. While still at Madison, the couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology, who had been invited to study in America. It was at a Friday evening gathering organized by John R. Commons, that Greta met Arvid and Mildred. A friendship developed between Mildred and Greta that lasted for many years. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff. Kuckhoff was drawn into an intimate group of Wisconsin "radicals" known as the "Friday Niters Club". According to fellow student, Dorothy Meyer a member of the group, they considered themselves the elite. The Harnacks "Friday Niters Club" was to be a preface to their involvement in what then became known as the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The simple, albeit controversial conviction of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had rebounded to become a Cause célèbre. Harnack petitioned the governor to create a committee to investigate the controversy. The trial had the effect of transforming the Harnacks, in essence radicalising them. Many in the group protested the planned execution of the pair.
In March 1928, at the end of the semester, Harnack returned to Germany as his fellowship had ended while Mildred stayed for another year to complete her studies. On June 2, 1929, Mildred Harnack moved to Germany. In 1929, the couple were living in the small university towns of Jenna and Giessen. In 1931, Harnack was promoted to his 2nd doctorate, a Doctor of Philosophy at University of Giessen with a thesis titled: "Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten" ("The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States") that dealt explicitly with the history of the American worker's movement. The thesis was sponsored by Friedrich Lenz, who founded the Giessen School of National Economics.
The Harnacks, like many of their counterparts, shared an interest in the Soviet Union. They decided to set up a study group in the autumn of 1931, along with Friedrich Lenz. At the height of the Great Depression, Harnack's hope was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between East and West. Lenz believed that only an alliance with the Soviet Union would relieve Germany of the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles and re-establish the country's position and return it to great nation status.
ARPLAN.
Harnack founded the "Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft" ("Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), or ARPLAN in 1931. This was an organisation of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy. Harnack became Secretary of the group and Lenz became the President. The first meeting of the group took place on 3 and 4 January 1932. The study group had around 50 members. Among them was the leading Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, who at the time was a member of the Russian trade delegation and Alexander Hirschfeld who was Harnack's contact at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. At the time, the Harnack's were also members of the Association of Intellectual Workers ("Bund der Geistesarbeiter"), also a communist front organisation. They were seen by Moscow as places that could recruit "people of good will" or "people of influence" but not necessarily party member's. According to Georgi Dimitrov, the head of Communist International, they were organisation's that enabled them to extend their influence to people that were difficult to reach. Communist or KPD members would stay in the background, in meetings that were open to all, but orientate the discussion to gain influence. The real purpose of organisations like ARPLAN was to draw people of influence who supported a pro-Soviet agenda in relation to German policy. Bessonov was under instruction to recruit suitable German technocrats for visits to the Soviet Union and extract useful information for the Soviet trade legation.
Salon.
In January 1932, Mildred lost her position teaching English. In May 1932, the couple were forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln, due to the presence of Nazis. The couple had leased the apartment from the writer Stefan Heym. In his postwar novel, "Nachruf" Heym stated he found the Harnack's to be a genial academic couple, but who had a determined outlook on the Nazis. The Harnack's hosted a Saturday Salon at Hasenheide where intellectual discussion among editors, publishers, and authors was freely expressed and where Harnack would lecture on Political economy and Marxism. Amongst those who attended was the writer , the publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, Heinrich Marie Ledig-Rowohlt, the translator Franz Frein, physician and writer Max Mohr, authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff and Ernst von Salomon, the journalist Margret Boveri and the critic Erich Franzen and Mildred's students like the writer Friedrich Schlösinger.
A three-week study trip encompassing the period from 20 August to 12 September 1932 to the Soviet Union was organized with the help of Bessonov and the Soviet embassy, for twenty-three members of ARPLAN The Soviet economy was observed in Moscow, Leningrad, Odesa, Kiew, and in the Dnieper region. There have been allegations that Harnack was recruited by Soviet intelligence, during the trip. In "David Dallins", "Soviet Espionage" he describes the trip as the "turning point" in Harnack's life. He was asked bluntly by senior Comintern leaders to spy for the Soviet Union and Harnack consented. This allegation was again repeated in 1994 by KGB Deputy Director Pavel Sudoplatov. although it was not recorded in Harnack's own records. Even though the group travelled through Ukraine and as academics, many of the group took notes, including Harnack, the group failed to notice the vast famine that was unfolding in front of them. When Arthur Koestler made the same trip at the same time, he documented a ragged army of starving people in almost every station. Koestler believed that the Harnacks' mentality was driven by the fact that they knew that the propaganda effect put on by the Soviets existed and that although they knew the standard of living in the west was much higher than the Soviet Union, they judged that Soviet citizens were much better off under Stalin than they were under the Czar.
Career change.
By the end of 1932, a scientific career was no longer an option for Harnack in his strictly planned economic orientation at the universities, which were now national socialist, and he was no longer eligible for the careers of the National Socialist. His thesis on "The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States" could no longer be published. In the same year he began delivering illegal training courses for former members of the Marxist Workers School (MASCH) and at the Berliner Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene"), an evening high school for adults that taught a curriculum that was suitable for attendees to obtain the Abitur, and offering university admission. while Mildred started teaching English literature also at the same school.
After Hitler's rise to power and the Reichstag fire in early 1933, the Harnacks hastened to lower their profile. They decided to dissolve ARPLAN the following month, March 1933. The membership list was destroyed and many members fled abroad. Lenz was attacked at Giessen University by the SS and his house was raided. In September he was dismissed from the university due to being "politically unreliable".
Resistance.
In 1933, Harnack was appointed to the position of scientific advisor at the Reich Ministry of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsministerium). Harnack eventually achieved the rank of senior civil servant (Oberregierungsrat) in 1938 and worked on balance of payments and foreign exchange questions in the context of trade. As chief of trade policy, Harnack was part of many decision making processes involving a very large number of people, including contacts in the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). Over time, Harnack garnered a detailed knowledge of the German economy, and when he was promoted to senior civil servant, he was legitimately able to form contacts with the American trade counterparts at the American embassy.
The same year, he also finished his legal qualifications in Jena, successfully completing the junior law examination.
With the writer Adam Kuckhoff, and his wife, Greta, the Harnacks assembled a discussion circle that debated political perspectives on the time after the National Socialists' expected downfall or overthrow.
p86 brysac
Harnack were good friends with the lawyer and academic Carl Dietrich von Trotha. Harnack knew Horst von Einsiedel, also a lawyer, since 1934.
In 1934, the couple moved to the 3rd floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten. The house was destroyed in the war and is now known as 14 Genthiner Straße.
By 1935, Harnack was employed as a lecturer on foreign policy at the University of Berlin.
On 8 August 1935, three months after Harnack joined the trade ministry, he met with the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Alexander Hirschfeld in a meeting that lasted three hours. During the meeting, Hirschfeld informed Harnack that his position in the trade ministry could provide useful information that could be used to defeat the Nazis, and offered to establish a system to convey the documents to Moscow. Harnack agreed to be an informer and was give the codename "Balt", assigned a control officer, Alexander Belkin and assigned a mission to increase his sources by building a network of contacts. However, Hirschfeld requested that Harnack break of all relation's with the KPD and to avoid working for the resistance, but he decided not to comply Harnack was never interested in becoming a Soviet agent, he considered himself a communist and would supply information to anybody who would take part in anti-fascist operations that helped to destroy the Nazi's According to KGB sources, between 1935 and 1938 Harnack supplied information relating to the German currency, German investments abroad and details of the German foreign debt. Harnack also provided details of secret trade agreements to Soviet intelligence. During that period, Harnack circulated the same information to other groups.
In 1935, Harnack had his first contact with the fervent anti-nazi Harro Schulze-Boysen, however due to their different temperaments, Harnack decided not to meet again.
At the end of 1937 and formally on 3 March 1938 William Dodd was replaced with ambassador Hugh Wilson. Joining him as the First Secretary and monetary attaché at the U.S. Embassy was Donald Heath. US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. felt that the Berlin embassy needed a treasury attaché who could ferret out German economic information. So Heath became an intelligence agent in the office of coordination at the embassy (a forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services). His job was to recruit sympathetic informers, that could provide that type of information. Mildred met Louise Heath, Donald Heath's wife, at the American Women's Club in Bellevuestrasse in 1937. Mildred and Arvid became friends with Donald Heath and his wife Louise Heath. Initially Harnack was resistant to the overtures of Heath but by 1938 was providing him with intelligence. At the start of World War II, Louise Heath and her son, Donald Heath Jr. fled to Norway and returned several months later when they realised it would be safe. When they returned, Louise Heath requested that Mildred tutor her son in American Literature. The two couples began to regularly spend weekends together and occasionally holidayed together. At other times Harnack and Heath would meet in the countryside to exchange intelligence, but it was becoming increasingly dangerous. Between December 1939 and March 1941, Donald Heath Jr. couriered between Harnack and the American embassy. He would also deliver food from Denmark and Italy as well as medicine for the Harnack's. After the war, Heath acknowledged to both his family and the Harnack family, that Arvid Harnack was his source for German economic intelligence.
In 1937, the former Prussian minister of culture and religious socialist Adolf Grimme was brought into the group through his college friend, Adam Kuckhoff. and playwright Günther Weisenborn. Harnack had met Grimme previously at the funeral of Adolf von Harnack on the 10 June 1930.
On 26 January 1937, a new civil service law gave Nazi officials the power to sack tenured civil servants. Walther Funk, the manager of Harnack at the Ministry, persuaded him to join the Nazi party to protect himself, to become what was known as a "Hamburger", i.e. Nazi brown outside, Moscow red inside. In May 1937, Harnack joined the Nazi party with number: 4153569.
The lawyer Wolfgang Havemann, the son of Gustav Havemann, became a frequent visitor to the Harnacks group discussions after 1938.
In mid-August 1939, Harnack returned from a trade mission to Washington, to secure copper and aluminum supplies.
Harnack/Schulze-Boysen Group.
In 1940, Harnack had access to other resistance groups and began to cooperate with them. The most important of these was a group run by Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and descendant of an old German military family, who had known Harnack since 1935, but was reintroduced to him sometime in late 1939 or early 1940 through Greta Kuckhoff. The Kuckhoffs had known the Schulz-Boysen's since 1938 and started to engage them socially in late 1939 or early 1940 by bringing Mildred and Libertas together while on holiday in Saxony.
On the 17 September 1940, Arvid and Mildred met the third secretary member of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Korotkow who used the alias "Alexander Erdberg" while meeting the couple in their Tiergarten apartment. Korotkov was a Soviet intelligence agent who had been operating clandestinely in Europe for much of the 1930s as an employee of the foreign intelligence service of the Soviet People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) but had been dismissed during Stalin's purges, but managed to work back into the service via help from his friend Lavrentiy Beria. Initially wary and suspicious of the uninvited guest, Korotkow proposed to Harnack a second meeting at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, where Korotkow could verify his bona fides and prove to Harnack that he was not a decoy. Korotkow finally convinced Harnack, who was reluctant to agree. Several reasons have been advanced as to why Harnack decided to become a spy, including a need for money, being ideologically driven, and possibly blackmail by Russian intelligence. It was known that Harnack had planned an independent existence for his friends. According to a statement by Korotkow discovered after the war, he thought Harnack was not motived by money nor ideologically driven but that he was specifically building an anti-fascist organisation for Germany, as opposed to an espionage network for Russian intelligence. He considered himself a German patriot.
In mid-April 1941, in an attempt to increase the influx of intelligence, the Soviets ordered Korotkow to create a Berlin espionage operation and Harnack was asked by Korotkow to run it. Korotkow was instructed by Soviet intelligence to provide a person in Berlin that could be contacted via radio, in the event of war. Harnack refused to be contacted in that manner and agreed only to collect and encipher the material in his own apartment, but the transmission would take place somewhere else. In June 1941, on approval from Harnack, Korotkow delivered a wireless transmitter to Greta Kuckhoff during a meeting at an underground railway station. The device was mounted in a case, had a range of 600miles but the battery only lasted two hours. The aim of the operation was to organise the Harnack group into an independent network with direct contact with Soviet intelligence. In May, two further shortwave radio transmitters were delivered by diplomatic pouch. One was battery powered. The second one was dismantled, in a manner that enabled its fitting to a suitcase. It needed an electrical supply to operate. However, when Adam Kuckhoff's tested the first transmitter, it failed to work so it was returned the following week. On 1 July 1941, Korotkow and the Soviet embassy staff, along with many other Soviet citizens left Germany on a train.
In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group intensified its leaflet propaganda. At the same time, the group started to collect military intelligence in a careful, systematic manner that could be used to overthrow the Nazis. Members of both groups were convinced that only by the military defeat of the Nazis could Germany be liberated and that by shortening the war, perhaps millions of people could be saved. Only in that way would Germany be able to be saved as an independent state at the centre of Europe.
In 1941, Harnack sent the Soviets information about the forthcoming invasion. That same year, he published the resistance magazine, "Die innere Front" ("The Inner Front"). At about the same time, he received information from Rudolf von Scheliha about the Final Solution.
Discovery.
The discovery of the illegal radio transmissions by Soviet agent Johann Wenzel by the German radio counterintelligence organization Funkabwehr and his capture by the Gestapo on 29–30 June 1942 eventually revealed the members of the group and led to the arrest of the Harnacks. Wenzel decided to cooperate after he was tortured. His exposure of the radio codes enabled Referat 12, the cipher bureaux of the Funkabwehr, to decipher Red Orchestra message traffic. The unit had been tracking Red Orchestra radio transmissions since June 1941 and found Wenzels house in Brussels was found to contain a large number of coded messages. When Wilhelm Vauck, principal cryptographer of the Funkabwehr, the radio counterintelligence department of the Abwehr received the ciphers from Wenzel, he was able to decipher some of the older messages. On 15 July 1942, Vauck managed to decrypt a message dated 10 October 1941 that gave the locations of the Kuckhoff's and the Schulze-Boysen's apartments.
When Vauck decrypted this message, it was forwarded to Reich Main Security Office IV 2A, where they identified the people living at the three addresses. The three couples were put under surveillance on 16 July 1942. There was a member of Schulze-Boysen's group working in Referat 12 in Vauck's team: Horst Heilmann, who was supplying Schulze-Boysen with intelligence. Heilmann tried to contact Schulze-Boysen but was unsuccessful and left a message with him to phone him back. Schulze-Boysen returned the call, but Vauck answered the phone and when he requested the name of the caller to take a message and was met with Schulze-Boysen, the deception was revealed and the group exposed.
Trial and death.
On 7 September 1942, Arvid and Mildred Harnack were arrested by the Gestapo, while on a short holiday to the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.
Arvid Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the "Reichskriegsgericht" ("Reich Military Tribunal"), and was put to death three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. He and his co-conspirators were hanged from meat hooks by piano wire, a method designed to prolong their suffering. Mildred Harnack was originally sentenced to six years in prison, but Hitler swiftly cancelled the sentence and ordered a new trial, which pronounced the desired death sentence. She was beheaded by guillotine. The Harnacks' bodies were released to Hermann Stieve, anatomy professor at Humboldt University, to be dissected for research. A cenotaph was installed for them after the war by Arvid's brother Falk Harnack, a member of the White Rose resistance group, at Zehlendorf Cemetery.


Robert Abshagen

Robert Abshagen (January 12, 1911 in Hamburg – July 10, 1944) was a German Resistance fighter against National Socialism and a Communist.
Biography.
Abshagen first worked in insurance, then as a sailor and finally, as a construction worker. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1931.
Beginning in 1933, he took part in the illegal German Resistance in Hamburg against Nazism. In 1934, he was sentenced in Hamburg state supreme court of "Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat" (intent to commit treason) to two and a half years at hard labor in a "Zuchthaus", which he spent in Bremen-Oslebshausen Prison in Gröpelingen.
After serving his sentence, he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. While at Sachenhausen, Absagen and other prisoners, including Bernhard Bästlein, held cultural and literary gatherings. As the Nazis began to deport more Jews after Kristallnacht, they also plundered their books and stockpiled them in concentration camps. In 1936-1937, the Sachsenhausen library had 500 books and two years later, 800 books. Beginning in 1936, Bästlein and Volker Paddry recited poetry and prose they had learned by heart and Abshagen held programs on proletarian and progressive writings. These programs strengthened the spirit of those who attended, who then lifted the spirit of those who hadn't and thus, the prisoners remained unbroken by their circumstances.
Abshagen was released in April 1939 and returned to Hamburg, where he again got involved in the Communist Party Resistance movement in Hamburg, in the waterfront district. In 1940, he got in touch with Bernhard Bästlein and Franz Jacob, who were also recently released from prison. Their group later became known as the Bästlein-Jacob-Abshagen Group.
Abshagen took charge of various workplace cells and maintained contact with the Resistance in other parts of Germany. In this capacity, Abshagen traveled to Berlin, Saxony and Thuringia and made contact with anti-fascists in the Ruhr area.
The special Rote Kapelle commission led to a wave of arrests by the Gestapo in autumn of 1942. The commission's findings related to the activities of Erna Eifler and Wilhelm Fellendorf swept up Abshagen on October 19, 1942. He was sentenced to death by the "Volksgerichthof" (People's Court) on May 2, 1944 and was beheaded in Hamburg on July 10, 1944. His urn was buried in 1946 at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, at the memorial for the executed Resistance fighters from Hamburg. There is a stolperstein for Abshagen at Wachtelstraße 4 in the Barmbek-Nord suburb of Hamburg.


Johann Maier

Johann Maier (23 June 1906 in Berghofen, today part of Aham, Lower Bavaria – 24 April 1945 in Regensburg) was from 1939 until his death a preacher at Regensburg Cathedral.
On 22 April 1945, Reich Defense Commissioner Ludwig Ruckdeschel took city defence to the extreme in Regensburg when United States Army tanks had already reached the Danube.
The next day, an excited crowd of people gathered at the Moltkeplatz – nowadays known as Dachauplatz. Johann Maier was there and bade the crowd be quiet as he had something to say. He called for the town's peaceful handover. Even before he had finished his speech, he was seized by plainclothes police. Likewise, several other demonstrators were arrested. That evening, Maier was brought before a drumhead court and sentenced to death by hanging. Michael Buchberger, the Bishop of Regensburg, was frightened into silence and hid himself in a cellar.
On the morning of 24 April 1945 at 3:25, Maier was hanged at Moltkeplatz. About his neck, he wore a sign that said "I am a saboteur". Later the Wehrmacht and the SS both fled southwards out of town; Regensburg fell without a fight.
Maier's grave can be found in the Cathedral among the bishops' graves. There is also a memorial plaque at the Cathedral.


History of law in Taiwan

This page is a history of the legal regime in Taiwan.
Aboriginal Law (pre-1624).
The earliest majority inhabitants of Taiwan were probably from Southeast Asia and are racially similar to the Malay group who inhabit Malaysia and Indonesia. Other minority groups to inhabit Taiwan during this time were the Han Chinese, Japanese traders, European explorers, missionaries, and other traders. One origin of law of Aboriginal peoples came from a concept of "chongzu" 崇祖, or ancestral worship. Ancestral spirits were believed to exist forever and co-exist among the living. It was thought that if you violate customs or taboo, this would possibly result in some sort of catastrophe and would require subsequent prayer to the ancestors to avoid such a catastrophe from happening again. Breaking the law was thought to have the result of multiple levels of trouble for you or your family. Criminal Law at this time took on the philosophy of “an eye for an eye”. Another important aspect was the concept that traditional customs, no matter what the content, were accepted as normal.
Most laws and customs were passed by word of mouth. Tribes had a chief that was elected or chosen by bloodline. He was considered the local leader and representative to foreign tribes.
Penalties for unlawful acts were separated into non-property related penalties (ex. bodily harm) and property related penalties. Non-property related crimes would result in corporal punishment such as caning. Property related crimes would result in compensation. The leader of the tribe was arbitrator to disputes.
Dutch Rule (1624-1662).
From 1624 to 1662 the Dutch ruled Taiwan under the auspices of the United East Indian Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC in Dutch). The VOC was a trading company established in 1602 with the authority of the States-General of the Netherlands to carry out colonial activities in Asia.
The Governor during this time was the head of government and was empowered to legislate, collect taxes, wage war and declare peace on behalf of the VOC and, by extension, the Dutch state. Because the VOC was given diplomatic, administrative, judicial, and other functions of sovereignty, the Dutch legally exercised control over Taiwan. During their rule, the Dutch made serious efforts in the development of Taiwan. They established laws concerning aspects of life such as the levying of import and export tariffs, the sale of lands, the construction of houses, the organization of markets, the production of alcohol and sugar, gambling, and the granting of permission to enter and live in aboriginal settlements. The Dutch claimed they governed the whole island and created an administration and infrastructure that facilitated mostly commerce. They introduced land management and cultivation schemes as well as zoning and required a 10 percent tax on all production within their zones. They issued hunting licenses and taxed the subsequent catch. They also required a tax for certain staples.
The Dutch established a Court of Justice in the southern town of Tainan. The Dutch colonists maintained a concept of legal dualism. If the case involved Europeans, then Dutch law would take effect. If the case involved aboriginals, aboriginal law would take effect. If the case involved Han, then the customs of the Han people would take effect.
Koxinga (1662-1683).
The Kingdom of Tungning 東寧 was argued to be the first Han Chinese government to rule Taiwan. It was ruled by "Zheng Chenggong" (鄭成功), a child of Chinese and Japanese parents, between 1661 and 1683 after the defeat of the Dutch. The government at the time had a Chinese legal system, a court, scholars, and advisors. The government of this time was similar to a Ming Dynasty government.
Taiwan society during this time absorbed the legal and political system of imperial China along with the Confucian educational and philosophy systems. Although Confucian literati made up only a small portion of Taiwan Society, Confucianism had profoundly found its way into Taiwanese Society. Traditionally, power was in the hands of the father or grandfather with regards to disciplinary matters, marriage and property. There was also a strict division between government officials and citizens, between elders and the young, between husbands and wives, and between masters and servants, etc.
During this military occupation of Taiwan, the Aboriginals were still able to use their own law.
Qing Dynasty (1683-1895).
From 1683 to 1895, Taiwan was loosely ruled by the Qing administration. Initially, Taiwan was a prefecture of the Fukien province, and after 1886 Taiwan became a province of China.
The Great Qing Legal Code or Qing Code (大清律例), local customs and unofficial sources of law in imperial China were the source of law in Taiwan during this time. In 1875, because of the Qing Empire’s desire to fortify aboriginal areas (including eastern Taiwan), the Qing government repealed the restrictive policies towards Taiwan. The first governor of Taiwan (1884–91) Mr. Liu Ming Chuan, considered a national hero by many Taiwanese, made important reforms and improvements to the infrastructure of Taiwan. He set forth important tax and fiscal reforms and provided competent rule. In 1891 he was recalled by Beijing and retired.
It has been debated by scholars just how much effective control the Qing Chinese had and wanted to have. Furthermore, it has been debated whether Beijing considered Taiwan under its jurisdiction. In 1867, Taiwanese aboriginals killed a crew of shipwrecked Americans. Beijing responded by saying that aboriginal lands were not under the jurisdiction of China. In addition, popular uprisings were common. Some scholars estimate there were as many as eighty-five uprisings during the Qing rule. Dispute resolution in Taiwan at this time was similar to the Chinese legal tradition with unofficial resolution preferable to official court adjudication. The Chinese administration was largely ineffective in settling disputes and corrupt officials usually found in favour of whoever bribed them most successfully.> Conciliation was presided over by relatives or local notables, and only after conciliation failed would a magistrate hear the dispute, so locals were largely governing their own affairs.
Japanese rule (1895-1945).
Qing China was defeated in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and Japan took over control of Taiwan and the Penghu islands. The process, however, was not smooth and Taiwan desperately resisted the Japanese takeover, and this resistance influenced the initial legislative institutions in Taiwan. The Government-General of Taiwan was created by an imperial ordinance known as the Organic Regulations of the Government-General of Formosa (ORGG). This ordinance gave the Governor-General of Taiwan the rank similar to a Premier or Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in Tokyo. Among their powers were the power to control general political affairs, the power to command the military and naval forces, and the power to handle judicial affairs. In March 1896 the Imperial Diet (Japan’s legislature 帝國議会 "Teikoku-gikai", currently the National Diet of Japan 国会 "Kokkai") enacted the Law Relating to Laws and Ordinances to Be Enforced in Taiwan (Title 63, or Law 63). This law gave the Governor-General the power to issue ordinances ("ritsurei") that have the same effect as Japanese law. Title 63 was extended every three years (article 6) until 1906 when it came under pressure from the public about its constitutionality. The law was often attacked in the Diet as illegal because it gave the Government General law-making power, not the Diet. As a result, in 1906, Title 63 was revised under Title 31, which restricted the powers of the Governor-General. These changes had little real effect and were revised further in 1921 under Title 3. Under Title 3, the power to issue "ritsurei" was restricted by the exception principle in Article 1. In theory, the effective law in Taiwan would increasingly be covered by Japanese Law.
Sources of law during this time for Patent Law, Copyright Law, Trademark Law, Criminal Procedure, Civil Code, Commercial Laws, Civil Procedure, and Maritime Laws were from Japanese Law. Organic Regulations of Law Courts and Criminal Law were governed by "ritsurei". This time period also marked a steady incorporation of western law into Taiwanese law.
Republic of China (1945-present).
Introduction.
The Transition of the Legal Systems, 1945-49.
The ROC legal system took effect in Taiwan on 25 October 1945 after most Japanese laws were repealed on 25 October 1946
Martial Law State, 1949-87.
The KMT-headed ROC central government moved to Taiwan in December 1949 followed by a large number of Chinese immigrants who eventually accounted for about 13 percent of Taiwan’s entire population. Taiwan and China have had distinct legal systems, but after this migration these distinctions have become even more pronounced. The “Statute for Agriculture, Mining, Industry and Commerce During the Extraordinary Period” (1938) and the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of General National Mobilization for the Suppression of Communist Rebellion" (1942) gave authorities the power to control resources, as well as establish political control over freedom of news, speech, press, communication, assembly and association during wartime.
Democratization of Law, 1987-present.
The government terminated Martial Law in 1987 and the Period of National Mobilization officially came to an end on 1 May 1991. With various constraints of the constitution lifted, legal reforms proceeded rapidly, along with the continued incorporation of western legal concepts being integrated into ROC Law.


Heller Ehrman

Heller Ehrman LLP was an international law firm of more than 730 attorneys in 15 offices in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Heller Ehrman was founded in San Francisco in 1890 and had additional offices located in most of the major financial centers around the world including New York City, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Beijing, Hong Kong and Singapore.
In September 2008, the firm encountered troubles after losing 15 intellectual property (IP) partners to Covington & Burling, which led to the collapse of merger talks with Mayer Brown on 14 September 2008. Including the above 15, a total of 50 partners had left the firm in 2008.
One anonymous legal market expert said the exit of the IP partners could constitute a default in Heller’s line of credit with its bank, effectively triggering liquidation.
On September 25, 2008, the firm confirmed its dissolution would occur on November 28, 2008. The firm filed a voluntary petition for chapter 11 bankruptcy for protection in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California on December 28, 2008.
Following the firm's bankruptcy, the firm's trustee had a dispute with the firm's former partners as to whether the firm or the individual partners are entitled to revenue from client matters pending at the time of bankruptcy. The dispute reached the California Supreme Court in 2016.
History and notable cases.
Heller Ehrman had its beginning in 1890 when Emanuel S. Heller opened his law practice at 124 Sansome Street, Room 30, in San Francisco, California. Heller was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, received his law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and passed the California Bar in 1889. In 1891, he became the primary attorney of banker Isaias W. Hellman and moved his office to the headquarters of Hellman's Nevada Bank (Heller would marry Hellman's daughter in 1899). In 1896, Francis H. Powers joined with Heller and the partnership name changed to Heller & Powers. In 1905, Sidney M. Ehrman (married to Isaias W. Hellman's other daughter Florence) and also a graduate of the Hastings, entered into partnership with Heller and Powers, forming Heller Powers & Ehrman. In 1921, Jerome White and Florence McAuliffe joined the partnership after the death of Francis Powers, establishing the firm as Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe LLP. The firm retained this name for more than 84 years until the name was shortened in 2005.
Between the years 1974 to 2007, Heller Ehrman realized an increase in business, causing the firm to branch out from the west coast with an additional 12 offices in locations ranging from London to Singapore. In 1986 the San Francisco headquarters was moved to a new skyscraper at 333 Bush Street. By 1991, the firm had 370 lawyers, over 3.5 times the number it had employed just ten years earlier.
In 1993, the first advertisement ever sold on the Internet was sold on the Global Network Navigator (now America On-Line) to Heller Ehrman LLP, and in 1994, Heller Ehrman launched the first law firm website.
By 2007, the firm had over 730 lawyers, over twice the number it employed just 15 years earlier. During the 2006 fiscal year it more than doubled its gross revenue from just 10 years earlier to a level just north of half a billion dollars.
1890: Emanuel S. Heller opens his law practice at 124 Sansome Street, Room 30, in San Francisco, California.
1906: Having withstood the San Francisco earthquake, the Heller family residence achieves a certain historical renown as it becomes the temporary headquarters for the firm's two major clients at the time: Wells Fargo Nevada National Bank and the Union Trust Company.
1921: Establishment of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe, with Sidney Ehrman entering the partnership in 1905 and Jerome White and Florence McAuliffe joining in 1921. The firm retains this name for more than 84 years.
1929: Florence McAuliffe negotiates the financing for the construction of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.
1930: Sidney Ehrman acts as counsel in the formation of the consortium of contractors, Six Companies, Inc., created to build the Hoover Dam. The firm will go on to litigate several cases for the consortium.
1934: Firm successfully takes up on appeal what would become a watershed case in Wells Fargo's history. The issue in McDuffie v. Wells Fargo Bank is whether the bank can apply the proceeds of four foreign bills of exchange to an indebtedness due from the Richfield Oil Company to the bank.
1937: Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge is completed. Jerome White serves as the Golden Gate Bridge District's General Counsel, arranging for the bonds to carry the project.
1959: Heller Ehrman takes long-time client Ampex Corporation public.
1960: Firm represents Consolidated Foods in a round of acquisitions, including Abbey Rents, Aris Gloves, Shasta Water Company and Sara Lee bakery products. Consolidated Foods will later change its name to Sara Lee Corporation.
1965: The antitrust case "GTE Sylvania, Inc. v. Continental T.V., Inc." begins, eventually making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975, where the Court finds in favor of firm client GTE Sylvania. The case sets a precedent for applying the "rule of reason" to vertical business restraints.
1968: Heller Ehrman Shareholder Julian Stern negotiates with Syntex Corporation for the services of Dr. Alejandro Zaffaroni, along with concepts and technology that Syntex does not want to pursue and Dr. Zaffaroni does. Upon completion of negotiations, Stern helps to set up ALZA Corporation, which will go on to pioneer drug delivery systems for the pharmaceutical industry.
1969: Heller Ehrman attorneys take on "Parisi v. Davidson" pro bono. The case, successfully argued in the U.S. Supreme Court, defines the rights of conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.
1971: Heller Ehrman takes Levi Strauss public and then structures the leveraged buyout when the company goes private in 1985.
1972: Firm helps to form Cetus Corporation, among the first of the biotechnology companies.
1974: Heller Ehrman opens its Silicon Valley office.
1976: Heller Ehrman defends client Arthur Young & Company in the cause celebre "SEC v . Geotek", the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) flagship case against the accounting profession.
1978: Heller Ehrman first opens an office in Hong Kong.
1979: Firm takes on an antitrust case for Levi Strauss & Company, in which Levi Strauss was charged with trying to control too tightly the price charged for its goods by retailers. The Federal Trade Commission first rejects a draft settlement by Heller Ehrman attorneys, but later is prepared to settle on the same terms after the U.S. Supreme Court hands down the Sylvania decision.
1983: Shareholder Steven Bomse begins work for Hoffman La Roche, representing them in a contretemps with the University of California relating to Interferon, a promising anti-cancer drug developed by Roche jointly with Genentech. A UCLA scientist charged Roche with having stolen the living cells used to help produce the drug. The cell line had actually been sent voluntarily to a scientist who in turn sent it to Roche.
1983: Heller Ehrman opens its office in Seattle.
1993: Heller Ehrman's Hong Kong office re-established.
1985: Trial begins for the California Coordinated Asbestos Insurance Coverage Litigation, a gigantic case in which firm client Johns Manville's complaint against its insurers is joined with several other insurance coverage lawsuits. The case involves so many parties, the trial takes place in a specially constructed courtroom in the San Francisco Civic Center Auditorium.
1987: Heller Ehrman opens its Los Angeles office.
1988: Heller Ehrman successfully obtains an injunction forcing the government to place observers on tuna boats in order to protect the dolphin species under the terms of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
1994: Heller Ehrman opens an office in Singapore.
1994: Heller Ehrman opens its Washington, D.C. office.
1994: Heller Ehrman launches first law firm website.
1999: Heller Ehrman opens its New York office with acquisition of Werbel & Carnelutti.
2001: Heller Ehrman represents ALZA in its $12 billion merger with pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. The firm had represented ALZA since its incorporation in 1968.
2002: In the first high-profile case involving stem cell research, attorneys represent the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in a settlement with Geron Corporation that "could jump-start commercialization of stem cell research", according to The Wall Street Journal.
2002: Heller Ehrman negotiates an innovative settlement package for several related class action cases involved in the publicized "french fry" litigation on behalf of client McDonald's Corporation.
2003: Heller Ehrman represents Northrop Grumman Corporation in the $4.7 billion sale of TRW Automotive to The Blackstone Group. The transaction resulted in one of the largest leveraged buyouts in world history.
2003: Heller Ehrman's Hong Kong office adds 25 corporate attorneys from the Hong Kong law firm Siao, Wen and Leung.
2003: Heller Ehrman merges with Venture Law Group and expands its Silicon Valley presence to approximately 100 attorneys.
2003: The American Lawyer recognizes Heller Ehrman as one of the Top 20 "A-List" law firms in the U.S. The firm is again recognized in 2004 and 2005, one of only a handful of firms to make the list every year since its inception.
2004: Heller Ehrman opens its office in Beijing.
2004: Heller Ehrman adds 12 dispute resolution lawyers from the Hong Kong office of the London firm Denton Wilde Sapte.
2005: Heller Ehrman's FDA regulatory and patent teams, led by James Czaban (FDA law), and Joshua Rosenkranz (lead litigation counsel) receive a 9-0 decision in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of client Merck KGaA in "Merck KGaA v. Integra LifeSciences", a case establishing a patent infringement safe harbor for biotechnology research in pursuit of FDA regulatory approval.
2007: Heller Ehrman opens offices in London and Shanghai.
2008: Heller Ehrman dissolves.


Penta case

The Penta case (or -SQM, since the two cases are related) is a criminal case brought against Grupo Penta (or Empresas Penta), a Chilean holding company, and employees of the Chilean National Tax System (SII). Key employees of the firm have been convicted of committing tax fraud by creating fake invoices in the National Tax System (SII). These funds were then directed to the political campaigns of mainly UDI (far right wing) politicians as campaign contributions. Several Penta employees, as some of their family members, have been convicted of tax evasion, bribery, and money laundering. This case is still ongoing.
Update 2 December 2015: The former president of the UDI political party Jovino Novoa is sentenced to 3 years parole (pena remitida) for tax crimes.
Here are the defendants from Penta:
Here are the defendants from the SII:
Here are some of the politicians to whom Penta funneled funds.
Others charged:


Ruthild Hahne

Ruthild Hahne (19 December 1910 - 1 September 2001) was a German sculptor. Her most productive phase coincided with the early years of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
Life.
Provenance and early years.
Ruthild Hahne was born in Berlin. Her father is variously described as a businessman and as a factory owner. Elsewhere her parents are described as distant and domineering. She grew up in a prosperous household in a substantial family home in Berlin's Schmöckwitz quarter. The household included a housekeeper, a gardener and a chauffeur. She attended the single-sex secondary school in the city's Neukölln quarter. While she was there someone lent her a book by Karl Marx which she took home and read. Uncomprehending but captivated, this in due course triggered Hahne's enduring commitment to socialist values which was at variance with her parents' middle-class conservatism.
Career choices.
On leaving school she trained as an gymnastics-orthopedics teacher, and for several years worked as a gymnastics teacher, pursuing this career till 1936. Despite her background she had already made contact with elements of the labour movement and Communist Party. In 1930 she first met Jean Weidt, and in the early 1930s was a member of Weidt's expressionist "Red Dancers" company. Between 1931 and 1933 she took part in performances at Communist Party events. In 1933 she even took part in the first Theatre Olympiad Review in Moscow. However, 1933 was also the year in which, in January, the political backdrop was transformed when the Nazi Party took power and converted Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Jean Weidt himself fled abroad in May 1933, and Ruthild Hahne's parallel career as a member of a communist expressionist dance company came to an end. A couple of years later she quit her teaching job, and between 1936 and 1940 studied sculpture at the Berlin Arts Academy. Here she eventually became a "master student" of . Another of her teachers was Arno Breker, who was by now becoming a high-profile government supporter. In 1940/41 she received a bursary to study at the Villa Massimo art institute in Rome. This period saw her produce her classically formed small sculptures and portraits of children.
Resistance.
Wilhelm Gerstel's other master students included Fritz Cremer and . After the coming to power of the Nazis it was through these fellow students that Huhne came into contact with with whom she fell in love. In 1941 they moved in together. Since 1938 Ruthild Hahne had been identified by the Gestapo as a member of the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle"), a classification used by the authorities that included those believed to be involved in political activism or espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union. In the case of the Berlin Arts Academy there was indeed a resistance group among the arts students and Ruthild Hahne, reflecting her socialist beliefs, participated in it.
Her apartment at Nachodstraße 20 in the Berlin quarter of Wilmersdorf became a meeting point for resistance members and appears to have been one of the places where she worked with comrades on production of "Die innere Front" ("The Home Front"), an illegal anti-government news-sheet.
In Autumn 1942 the resistance cell was uncovered and its members were arrested on 21 October 1942. They faced the special "people's court" on 21 August 1943 and were convicted of performing illegal actions. Hahne's partner, , was sentenced to death and executed on 9 September 1943. Ruthild Hahne received a prison sentence of slightly less than five years. By this time, however, the world war had turned against Germany and the Soviet army had started a long advance from the east that would culminate in the capture of Berlin. In February 1945 Hahne was able to escape from the women's prison in Cottbus where she was being held: she now joined up with the Red army. War ended in May 1945 and in June 1945 Ruthilde Hahne returned to Berlin, penniless but free. She now lost no time in joining the Communist Party of Germany and when, in April 1946, within what would later become East Germany the party was controversially merged to form the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), she was among the thousands who lost no time in signing their membership across to what quickly evolved to become the ruling party for a new kind of German dictatorship.
Sculptor.
With Berlin now surrounded by the Soviet occupation zone, and the eastern part of the city administered as part of it, Hahne acquired an apartment in what was becoming the artists' quarter. Between 1946 and 1950 she worked as a teacher at the Applied Arts Academy (later better known as the ), of which some sources identify her as a co-founder. In her first major exhibition, held in the Arsenal Museum ("Zeughaus") she included a Head of Lenin which, according to her son, created a stir. It showed not merely the familiar power and energy of the man, but also a less familiar warmth and approachability. This opened the way to a career as a portrait sculptor, with busts of national heroes such as Karl Liebknecht (1950) and political leaders such as Wilhelm Pieck (1960) and even Walter Ulbricht (1963) that were displayed in schools and ministries. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and Hahne's political portrait-busts were and also presented as gifts to leaders of the new country's "socialist brother nations". Along with her more directly political portraiture, Hahne also produced more portrait-busts of children.
In 1953 Ruthild Hahne beat 182 rivals in a competition to provide a vast memorial to the former Communist leader Ernst Thälmann, to be placed what became, till 1986, Thälmann Square ("Thälmannplatz"). The work in some ways represented a career highlight, but was never completed. A succession of practical challenges delayed the project which then received its deathblow in 1961 with the erection of the Berlin Wall directly adjacent to its intended location. By this time, too, tastes had changed, and even in East Germany the imposing scale of the proposed memorial led to its characterisation in one official report as a "vulgar superficially illustrative realist construct" ("vulgäre, äußerlich illustrative Realismusauffassung"). There was also personal criticism of Hahne's "sinecure" based life style. Hahne was finally obliged to end work on the project in 1965: in the end, it was not till 1986 that a new national leader, Erich Honecker sanctioned Berlin's official public memorial to Thälmann , but it was placed in a different location and produced by a different artist, comrade Lev Kerbel.
After the long-running saga of the Thälmann Square memorial, Hahne's public profile was somewhat diminished. She nevertheless continued to produce portrait busts, notably of the writers Bruno Apitz (1966) and Kurt Stern (1968). In 1971, which coincidentally or not was the year in which Walter Ulbricht lost power, Ruthild Hahne was awarded the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver. It was only in 1985 that she was able to hold her first personal exhibition.
Legacy.
Ruthild Hahne's legacy has been nurtured by her adopted son, Dr. Stefan Hahne. Between 09.00 and 15.00 he works as an Egyptologist, studying hieroglyphs. The second part of the afternoon he devotes to his mother's former studio, where he still lives and curates what has become a private museum where in 2008 it was reported that visitors could sometimes take the opportunity study Ruthild Hahne's work.
Parts of the Thälmann memorial to which she devoted so many years were destroyed after 1965. Others, including notably a half sized image of Thälmann and a group of "workers and peasants" positioned behind him, can still be seen at the studio-museum curated by her son at house number 201/1 in Berlin-Niederschönhausen. The Berlin Märkische Museum also houses two quarter-sized sections of Huhne's frieze design for the memorial.


Polly Berry

Polly Berry, also known as Polly Crockett and Polly Wash (b. c. 1818 – d. c. 1870–1880), was an African-American woman notable for winning two freedom suits in St. Louis, Missouri, one for herself, which she won in 1843, and one for her daughter Lucy, which she won in 1844. She sued for her own freedom based on having been held illegally as a child slave in the free state of Illinois. In 1842 Berry sued for the freedom of her daughter Lucy Ann Berry, as the girl had legally been born to a free woman. That case was argued by Edward Bates, the future U.S. Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln.
Polly Berry's life is primarily known through her daughter's memoir, "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom" (1891), the only first-person account of a freedom suit. She published her memoir under her married name of Lucy Delaney.
In the 1990s, the case files of these two suits were among more than 300 freedom suits discovered among nineteenth-century Circuit Court records in St. Louis. The Missouri State Archives and Washington University have created a searchable online database of the freedom suit files containing scanned images of the complete case files (which tend to be brief documents) held by the Circuit Court of the City of St. Louis and the Missouri Historical Society.
Biography.
In her case which she filed in 1839, Polly deposed that she was held as a child in slavery in Wayne County, Kentucky by Joseph Crockett. When she was about fourteen, he migrated west and took her with him to Illinois, where they stayed for several weeks. Illinois as a free state held that slaveholders who brought slaves into the state for extended periods forfeited their rights to their "property," and the slaves became legally free. During that time, Crockett hired out Polly for domestic servant tasks, and she was known as Polly Crockett. Next he took her up the Missouri River for about five years within the slave state of Missouri.
Polly was sold to a Major Taylor Berry in St. Louis, Missouri. She married one of his slaves, said to be a mulatto, and they had two daughters, Nancy and Lucy Ann Berry. (Much of this information came initially from Lucy Ann's memoir "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom" (1891). She had mistakenly said that her mother was born free in Illinois, kidnapped and sold into slavery.)
Following the Major's death, his widow Fanny Berry married Robert Wash, one of three Missouri State Supreme Court justices. Fanny Wash died a few years later. Despite Major Berry providing in his will to free his slaves after his and his wife's deaths, Fanny's widower Robert Wash sold Polly's husband to a plantation in the Deep South. The Berry daughters reclaimed Polly Berry (also called Polly Wash at the time, in reference to her master's name) and her daughters from Wash.
Fearing another sale, Polly Berry prepared her daughters for escape. While Nancy Berry was accompanying Mary Berry Coxe and her new husband on their honeymoon to Niagara Falls, New York, she fled successfully across the river by ferry to Canada, which had abolished slavery. There she first stayed with a friend of her mother's; she settled in Toronto, where she married and had her own family in freedom.
After conflict in the household of Mary Berry Coxe, Polly Berry was sold to Joseph M. Magehan, a lumberman. She escaped in 1839, reaching Chicago before being captured by slave catchers under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. They returned her to St. Louis and her master Magehan. She resolved to protect her daughter Lucy Ann, who was 12 years old.
Berry/Wash filed a freedom suit in the St. Louis Circuit Court on October 3, 1839, on the basis that, as a child, she had been illegally held as a slave in the free state of Illinois ("Polly Wash v. Joseph M. Magehan"). Her attorney was Harris Sprout. It was not until 1843 that her case was tried, but she successfully proved her case in court. While the case was pending, Wash was hired out as a laundress to earn money against her upkeep. Her daughter suggested in her memoir that Wash's attorneys proposed the strategy of filing separate suits for her and her daughter, to prevent a jury's worrying about taking too much property from one slaveholder.
Martha Berry Mitchell, another of the married daughters of the late Major Berry, claimed the slave girl Lucy Ann Berry as a domestic servant. Angered over the girl's lack of skills with laundry, Mitchell confronted her physically, which Lucy Ann resisted. Martha and her husband David D. Mitchell decided to sell the young slave downriver. (Mitchell was serving in St. Louis as the US regional Superintendent for Indian Affairs.) Before being shipped away, Lucy Ann escaped to a friend of her mother.
Polly Berry (then known as Polly Wash) immediately filed suit on September 8, 1842 as a "next friend" of her daughter against David D. Mitchell. Her own case had not yet been tried, and as a slave she had no individual legal standing, but the law allowed her to file a suit on behalf of her minor daughter. According to the rule of "partus sequitur ventrem", which had been adopted into US slave law, the status of children followed that of the mother. Since Lucy Ann was born to a woman considered free at the time in Illinois, she should also have been free. Lucy Ann was remanded to jail, where she was held for 17 months. Unusually, she was not hired out. Wash's attorneys wanted to ensure that Lucy Ann Berry was kept in St. Louis until the trial, but it also appeared that Mitchell enforced her imprisonment. Usually enslaved prisoners were hired out, with the wages given to the owner.
On June 6, 1843, Polly Wash was declared a free woman by an all-white jury, on the basis of witnesses who testified she had been held as a slave in Illinois, where the law ruled slaveholders' forfeited their rights to slaves if they stayed voluntarily in the state. This precedent of "once free, always free" had been set in the 1824 Missouri case of "Winny v. Whitesides". Wash's suit for her daughter had yet to be heard.
Lucy Ann's case was not heard until February 7 and 8, 1844. Her attorneys argued that Lucy Berry's freedom was based on her birth to a woman who had been proven to be free based on having been held illegally years before in Illinois. Francis Butter Murdoch, the former district attorney for Alton, Illinois, prepared the case. He was highly involved in freedom suits in St. Louis. (He had prosecuted the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in Alton by anti-abolitionists.)
Wash also gained the aid of the prominent Whig politician Edward Bates. Although a slaveholder, he argued the case in court. He was later appointed as the US Attorney General under President Abraham Lincoln. With Wash's case settled by the principle of "once free, always free," Bates was able to convince the jury that her daughter Lucy Ann Berry should be considered free as well.
As the scholar Eric Gardner writes,
To Bates--as to the majority of the Missouri Supreme Court for several years--such a principle actually depended on recognizing and allowing legal slavery: if an individual African American was not "once free"--through birth to a free mother, residence, manumission, or other circumstances carefully specified in state law--then she or he had no legal right to demand freedom. This syllogism, of course, explains why Bates could be a slaveholder and still support Lucy [Berry] Delaney; this premise is why, he argues by extension, the jury could do the same.
The record of the decision said, "it is therefore considered by the Court that said Plaintiff be liberated and entirely set free from the Defendant and from all persons claiming by, through, or under him by title derived since the commencement of this suit." Lucy Ann was 14 years old.
Wash filed a second suit on behalf of her daughter, for $1000 in damages against David D. Mitchell for false imprisonment. The information in the two case files does not entirely agree with the account in Lucy Delaney's autobiography. By this suit, Wash and Murdoch may have been trying to preclude Mitchell from appealing the court's decision, in addition to seeking reparations. They later dropped the suit without trial.
Lives in freedom.
Polly Berry lived with her daughter Lucy Ann for the rest of her life. At first they worked together as seamstresses. Polly Berry visited her daughter Nancy and grandchildren in Toronto in 1845, and the younger woman offered to settle her there. Berry chose to return to Lucy Ann and her familiar St. Louis roots. She died without seeing her husband again.
More than 45 years later, after a life of civic activism, in 1891 Lucy Ann Berry Delaney (then married) published her memoir "From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or, Struggles for Freedom". The only first-person account of a freedom suit, it is also considered a slave narrative, recounting the journey to freedom. She told of her mother's struggles to use the courts to gain their freedom. Delaney dedicated the book to the Grand Army of the Republic, which had secured the freedom of slaves throughout the South by its victory in the American Civil War. She described her adult life and activism in a variety of religious and civic organizations.
It was not until the 1990s that the Wash and Berry case files were discovered among hundreds of freedom suits . Although some—such as the Dred and Harriet Scott files—had been set aside, most freedom suits were filed by case number together with all the other circuit court case files; surviving indices generally listed them under the broad rubric of "trespass." Some early suits had been filed against the leading families of St. Louis, such as Chouteau, Cabanné, Sarpy, and Papin, who were slaveholders before and after the Louisiana Purchase. Under the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, the case files are available to scholars for research, and a searchable database with digitized images of each case file is online.


Tapu (Ottoman law)

Tapu (also Tabu) was a permanent lease of state-owned arable land to a peasant family in the Ottoman Empire. The term was also used to indicate the title deed that certified tapu rights.
In Palestine, the Turkish word "tapu" was pronounced "tabu" by the Arabs, and has been carried over into Hebrew as such.
The family head acquired the usufruct of the land and was able to transmit this right to his male descendants upon his death. In return, he pledged to cultivate the land on a continuous basis and to meet a series of fiscal requirements and obligations to fulfill specific services to the state or to the "sipahi"s.
Tapu is the basis of the Ottoman agrarian system revolving around family-scale units called "çifthane".
External links.
İ & Q, "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914", Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.


De donis conditionalibus

De donis conditionalibus is the chapter of the English Statutes of Westminster (1285). It originated the law of entail – forbidding a landholder to sell his land except to his heirs.
Background.
A form of entail has been known before the Norman feudal law had been domesticated in England. The common form was a grant "to the feoffee and the heirs of his body", by which limitation it was sought to prevent alienation from the lineage of the first purchaser. These grants were also known as "feuda conditionata", because if the donee had no heirs of his body the estate reverted to the donor. This right of reversion was evaded by the interpretation that such a gift was a conditional fee, which enabled the donee, if he had an heir of the body born alive, to alienate the land, and consequently disinherit the issue and defeat the right of the donor. To remedy this the statute "De donis conditionalibus" was passed.
The statute.
In 1285 the statute "De donis conditionalibus" enacted that in grants to a man and his heirs, the will of the donor as expressed in the grant should be followed. The donee should have no power to dispose of the land in any other way. After the donee's death, the land would be inherited by his heirs – or if he had no heirs, then by the donor or the donor's heirs.
Since the passing of the statute, an estate given to a man and the heirs of his body has been known as an "estate tail", or an estate in fee tail ("feudum talliatum"). The word "tail" is derived from the French "tailler", to cut, the inheritance being by the statute cut down and confined to the heirs of the body.
Criticism.
It is claimed that the operation of the statute produced innumerable evils: "children, it is said, grew disobedient when they knew they could not be set aside; farmers were deprived of their leases; creditors were defrauded of their debts; innumerable latent entails were produced to deprive purchasers of the land they had fairly bought; treasons also were encouraged, as estates tail were not liable to forfeiture longer than for the tenant's life".
On the other hand, by limiting inheritance to the eldest son, the other issue were forced to seek employment elsewhere, thus, it has been argued, preventing the growth of a landed caste. The professions of the church, the army and the law were constantly recruited from the younger sons of landed families, preventing the gap between nobility and the rest.
Aftermath.
The power of alienation was reintroduced by the judges in Taltarum's Case (Year Book, 12 Edward IV., 1472) by means of a fictitious suit or recovery which had originally been devised by the regular clergy for evading the statutes of Mortmain.
This was abolished by the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833, which provided an alternative means of barring entails.


George Shurley

Sir George Shurley (1569–1647) was an English-born judge who held the office of Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. Uniquely among the holders of that office, he ranked as junior to Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas in precedence.
Family and early life.
He was born at Isfield, Sussex, the second son of Thomas Shurley and his first wife Anne Pelham of Laughton Place, a daughter of Sir Nicholas Pelham and Anne Sackville (who was a first cousin of Anne Boleyn ). Sir John Shurley, the prominent politician and MP, was George's brother. Their great-grandfather, John Shurley, who held office as Cofferer to Henry VIII, had acquired Isfield in the 1520s. George's birth date is sometimes given as 1559, but was probably ten years later as John, who was the elder of the two brothers, was born in 1568.
He matriculated from Clare College, Cambridge in 1587, and was called to the Bar in 1597; he was entered the Middle Temple and was made a Bencher of the Temple in 1607.
Judge.
He was sent to Ireland as Lord Chief Justice in 1620, with a knighthood. He became Treasurer of the King's Inn, and a member of the Privy Council of Ireland. He sat in the Court of Castle Chamber (the Irish equivalent to Star Chamber); but he had a reputation for being "aloof" and for refusing to meddle in politics, and he left little trace on the records of those bodies.
He is known to have been outraged at being forced to yield precedence to Dominick Sarsfield, 1st Viscount Sarsfield, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, a step which he termed "a discourtesy never before offered to one in my position". Apart from the issue of precedence, he could reasonably have complained at any honour being shown to Sarsfield, a judge who was already notorious for corruption, which led to his eventual removal from the Bench, and who died in disgrace. Shurley is also said to have complained of being forced to go on assize in Ulster (possibly because of the appalling condition of the roads), although he was happy to take the Munster circuit, and appears to have been diligent enough in the exercise of his duties.
In the disturbed period following the Irish Rebellion of 1641, he returned to England for a time and lived in Chester; but he owned a substantial mansion, Young's Castle in Dublin, (no trace of which remains now), together with lands in County Carlow, and wished to spend his last years in Ireland. He returned to Ireland, and made a speech denouncing Confederate Ireland in 1644. Apparently despairing of enjoying a peaceful life in Ireland, in 1646 he retired to Brightling in Sussex, where he died the next year. He was buried at St Margaret's Church, Isfield, with an impressive memorial.
Family.
Shurley married Mary, daughter and heiress of Edward Halfhide of Aspenden, Hertfordshire. They had at least four sons and two daughters: two of their sons, Robert and Arthur, in turn inherited Isfield from their uncle Sir John Shurley. One of George's daughters, Judith, married Sir Samuel Crooke, 2nd Baronet, son of Sir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet; Sir Thomas was the founder of Baltimore, County Cork. The Crooke estates later passed by inheritance to the Warren baronets. The other Shurley daughter Penelope married Francis Selwyn.
While In Ireland Sir George Shurley took an Irish wife named Anna. After his time as Chief Justice he went back to England without Anna, returning to Mary and their family in England. Angry with George, Anna raised her children as an Irish bloodline, even though Sir George insisted on their noble bloodline. This is how the Irish "Shurley" family came to be.
Lady Shurley made her last will in April 1654, and may have died later the same year, as she refers in her will to her "serious illness". She owned property in both Ireland and Chester, the bulk of which she left to her daughter Penelope Selwyn. From the will it seems that of her other children, Arthur, Judith, and another son, Thomas were still living in 1654.
Character.
Elrington Ball states that Shurley was not a judge of outstanding ability, but that he was impartial and conscientious, and noted for his refusal to engage in political controversy. He was also known to be a man of integrity, at a time when Irish judges were frequently accused of corruption.