The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 included a double standard in its provisions. While a wife's adultery was sufficient cause to end a marriage, a woman could divorce her husband only if his adultery had been compounded by another matrimonial offense. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 granted a wife the right to divorce her husband for adultery alone and thus removed the double standard with respect to the grounds for divorce from English statutes. Although the 1923 act was contemporaneous with other reforms extending the legal rights of women, an analysis of the public debates regarding divorce reform indicates that the statute was not based solely on a desire to provide equitable matrimonial relief for husbands and wives. The belief that male adultery contributed to such social problems as prostitution, illegitimacy, and the spread of venereal disease was as significant in the passage of the 1923 act as the demand for equal access to divorce for men and women.

Almost from the start of South Africa's transition to democracy in the 1990s, the issue arose of how those both within the National Party government and from the opposition who had committed human rights abuses would be treated. Like many other countries undergoing democratic regime change, South Africa's endeavors to exorcise the demons of its past while ensuring stability have depended and continue to depend to a certain extent on the delicate choice between truth telling and retribution, a choice, in turn, closely tied to the process of democratization and to the distibution of power within the body that led the change. The authors ask how the nature of the South African transition and the character of the transitional authority affected the treatment of past abuses. They further examine the way the transitional authorities balanced retribution and truth telling and the consequences of their actions for the stability of the new democracy.

This article is part of a larger study on the history of industrial safety law in the United States, one that places particular emphasis on the development of competing attributions of the causes of industrial injury as that development relates to changes in technology, political economy, and culture. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, long noted as a catalyst for Progressive Era factory reform, worked a change in the legal culture's “common sense” of why and how industrial injuries took place. By focusing on and making tangible causal theories that had been in circulation for some time but never embodied successfully in the law, the Triangle fire destroyed long-standing ideological barriers to factory legislation. It thus played a significant role in laying the epistemological foundation of the modern regulatory state.

On 20 April 1994, in Versailles France, Paul Touvier was convicted of complicity to commit crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of seven Jews during World War II. At the time of the crime Touvier was an oficer of the Milice, a special military force established to combat the Resistance and other enemies of the Vichy government. When Touvier's trial was finally held in spring 1994, it was the subject of enormous media attention in France and became the vehicle for a debate on the legitimacy and activities of the Vichy Regime, becoming popularly identified as a trial of the Vichy government. This essay, after tracing the historical and legal background of Touvier's prosecution, concludes that Touvier's conviction some 50 years after his crime, was legally and morally justified. Touvier's evasion of the law was remedied; his victims and their descendants were honored; the Nuremberg principles were resurrected and applied. The author is skeptical, however, about using his trial to reexamine the Vichy period and suggests that its attempted transformation by the media into an event that would produce an authoritative resolution of the various public discourses concerning Vichy France was and could only have been a disappointment.

Sociologists lack clarity and consensus about their scholarly mission. Some are purely and coldly scientific, some morally or politically critical, and some warmly or sentimentally humanistic. Their ultimate concerns include the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Others are not explicit or even self-conscious about what they seek to accomplish, and still others combine various styles—scientific, critical, and humanistic—and are difficult or impossible to classify at all. Their discourse is cacophonous. The utterances of some are uninteresting to others, and their assessments of one another commonly seem completely misdirected.

When in East Germany communist rule broke down, West Germans stood ready to take over. The end of communism also meant the end of the German Democratic Republic state; unification came as unconditional surrender to the western Federal Republic of Germany. The purge of the former regime's leaders therefore became intertwined with the West German takeover. With the takeover came Western politicians, managers, and professionals, forcing East Germans to compete fur jobs and influence. Opportunistic strategies with regard to the future buildup thus mixed with the desires for revenge and justice toward those responsible for the communist past. In this article I focus especially on the screening of the East German legal profession for reemployment in the unified Germany. In the West German tradition the legal profession forms the core of the civil services. In communist states lawyers had remained relatively marginal to the center of political power. Thus Western perceptions of the role of law account for the demise of the East German legal profession. That demise is taking place at a time when the Western regime is in need of many more legally trained people than ever worked in East Germany.

One part of building a new constitution after wars, revolutions, civil wars, or dramatic regime changes is to draw a cultural boundary in time, declaring various aspects of the old regime illegitimate and various legalities and constitutional principles of the new regime legitimate. One part of that process, in turn, is to decide how the new regime should treat the guilt of individuals for terror, collaboration, betrayal of information to the regime, and the like. This essay argues that such lustration processes should be a very minor part of the definition of the meaning of the pat, and even less of a part of building social supports under the new constitution. It also assesses the contributions on lustration in this issue in light of this view of what place lustration should play in the construction of democratic constitutions after authoritarian regimes.