The inglorious twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (autumn 1917), came to be an icon of catastrophe in the national awareness. It has remained one of the most persistent memory sites in Italian culture. However, many of the revolutionary myths proved in time to be little more than legend or false reports of war. There was no betrayal, no organized subversive plot, no attempt to ‘do a Russia’, yet Caporetto still has evocative power over the collective memory, outweighing the ‘splendid recovery’ on the Piave. Not only is it the most written about (and debated) battle in the history of unified Italy, it is also the only one whose name has entered common parlance to conjure up moral and material disaster. This more than explains why it was also the culminating experience in the life of Luigi Cadorna. Not only did it end his career, it turned him into a reprobate. He who even days before had been an untouchable idol, was now tarred with the brush of incompetence, even treason, and put through the public disgrace of a court of enquiry vetting his every act of command. Unsurprisingly, Caporetto was a ghost which Cadorna tried to shake off for the rest of his days.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

The chapter presents an overview of the procedural arrangements adopted at the international criminal jurisdictions, namely the UN ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC), covering the main milestones from the initiation of the investigation to trial phase to appeals against the judgment and sentence and review. Before delving into the trajectories of an criminal case before international criminal courts and tribunals, the chapter highlights the origins of international criminal procedure in the common law (Anglo-American, or ‘adversarial’) and civil law (Continental, or ‘inquisitorial’) approaches, resulting in its legal nature as a hybrid scheme where the balance between the domestic influences varies by tribunal and over time due to reforms pursued by judge-legislators (ICTY and ICTR) or by states and, to a lesser extent, judges (ICC). The chapter reviews the role and functions of the main actors in international criminal proceedings, including repeat or professional players (judges, prosecutors, and defence) and other participants such as victims and witnesses and states and international organisations. It also highlights the normative importance of human rights to international criminal process and the imperative of complying with the principles of public, fair and expeditious proceedings.

This chapter discusses some of the existing beliefs about juror decision-making and the jury process at three distinct phases of a trial: before the trial, during the trial, and at the trial’s conclusion. Before the trial, there are beliefs surrounding the jury process, including jury duty, jury size, and jury selection (i.e. voir dire). During the trial, there are common beliefs surrounding courtroom factors that influence jury decision-making, including attitudes, beliefs, and expectations regarding attorneys, expert witnesses, confession evidence, and emotion-evoking evidence. Finally, at the end of trial, there is the existing belief that juries make extreme and unpredictable decisions in civil and criminal court. This chapter uses current research and empirical evidence within law and behavioral sciences to examine these myths, showing support for some of these beliefs, while also showing that others are simply myths about jury decision-making. Finally, the chapter discusses future research to address such myths.

This conclusion summarises how realistic trials and realistic systematic reviews offer a method by which evaluation and evidence synthesis can become more useful by becoming more scientific and moving beyond being a form of sophisticated descriptive monitoring of ‘what works’. Evaluation can become more scientific both by continuing to use the most scientifically rigorous methods, as well as by being focused on the testing and refining of scientific theory. Critical realism and realist evaluation approaches offer a useful framework for constructing such theory because they offer the most plausible account of how causality operates in the complex social world. We hope that, by making these arguments, we have persuaded readers that trials and systematic reviews need to be reoriented and reformed rather than thrown away altogether. The incorporation of realist enquiry methods into randomised trials and systematic reviews offers us the best hope of evaluation and evidence synthesis that generate evidence which is both more scientific and more useful.

The trial of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324 took place as the result of charges made against this business woman by members of her own family. Richard Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, was keen to obtain her condemnation for demonic association, on the charges listed in this excerpt from the account of her trial which include sacrifices and the boiling of disgusting potions.

Oral witness is also the basis for the account of what Margery Baxter, charged with heresy at Norwich in 1428, has said and done. Her friends and neighbours are called to witness against her, and through their words we learn not only of the shocking things she has said which confirm her contempt for the Church, but details of the women’s lives.

Judicial law-making has frequently been likened to arts and crafts of various sorts, from minting coins to writing novels. While considering these analogies and how they demonstrate the reality of the law’s fabricating processes, the deeper aim of this chapter is to challenge the assumption that facts and truths established in law courts are ‘found’ and ‘discovered’. It is only by acknowledging that legal facts and legal truths are made by judicial crafts that we will come to appreciate the merits of those crafts and to discern the attributes of truth-making in courts that set the standard by which to judge the quality of truth claims in other contexts.

An emotive, haunting story of a community torn apart, the Essex witch accusations and trial of 1581-2 are, taken together, one of the pivotal instances of that malign and destructive wave of misogynistic persecution which periodically broke over early modern England. Yet, for all their importance in the overall study of witchcraft, the so-called witches of St Osyth have largely been overlooked by scholars. Marion Gibson now sets right that neglect. Using fresh archival sources – and investigating not just the village itself, but also its neighbouring Elizabethan hamlets and habitations – the author offers revelatory new insights into the sixteen women and one man accused of sorcery while asking wider, provocative questions about the way history is recollected and interpreted. Combining landscape detective work, a reconstruction of lost spaces and authoritative readings of newly identified key documents, Gibson skilfully unlocks the poignant personal histories of those denied the chance to speak for themselves.

This chapter explores the trial of the St Osyth witches and the witches from surrounding communities, and follows them to their judgement and - in some cases - their deaths. It examines the creation of the news pamphlet that recounted the story of the witch trial, and suggests an author for that famous account, showing how it shaped the story of the St Osyth witches that has been handed down to modern readers.

This paper examines the position taken and the discourse on the right of silence in Singapore. By position, I mean what the law is and how it got there. By discourse, I mean how officials talk when they go about defending legislative amendments or praising the current law. Does the experience in Singapore reveal a distinctly Asian perspective to the right of silence? The study of Singapore will be used as a springboard for theoretical reflections on the right in general. I hope to illustrate or instantiate this general point: while evidential reasoning is primarily theoretical; it is legally regulated by rules that are often shaped by practical – including political and ethical – considerations.

The rioting and looting after Henry Hunt’s great reform meeting on Spa Fields on 3 December 1816 marked a turning point in Thistlewood’s career. Its failure led to his attempt to flee to America, to his capture, and in June 1817 to the aborted treason trial of Watson, Preston, Thistlewood, and Hooper. This collapsed once it was shown to be based on the evidence of the spy John Castle.Henceforth Thistlewood was a marked man on the extremist edges of London radicalism.

Chapter 2 examines the largely overlooked writings of nineteenth-century clinicians, scientists, lawyers, and jurists who actually called for a third sex to be added alongside the ranks of “male” and “female” because, quite plainly, there were individuals for whom no “true sex” could be identified. The inflexibility of the Napoleonic Code, which required that all infants be sexed as either male or female at birth, was challenged by doctors and legal forensics experts who believed either that the Code was out of step with scientific progress, or that it did not do enough to protect citizens from “hermaphrodites.” In sensationalized court cases that riveted domestic and international audiences – both scientific and lay – doctors and jurists struggled to reconcile cases of “doubtful sex” with scientific evidence, social welfare, and the Code itself. Intersex people came into conflict with the law from the moment of their birth. Jurisconsults enthusiastically contradicted one another about the veracity of sex determinations, while influential men labored to revise laws regarding birth certificates, marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Ultimately, the only party remaining silent on “hermaphrodism” was the Code itself, ensuring that a legal blind spot only increased the visibility of those it tried not to see.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.