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From: Alan Dunne <alan.dunne@cogeco.ca> With Respect One of the mysteries of the history of English law is how and why, sometime under the Norman and Angevin kings the payment of weregild and such to victims or their kin was wholly replaced by fines payable to the Crown and corporal punishments not directly profitable. Later there was a new method of compensation for victims introduced, the action for trespass, for those able to come to London and pay high fees. A potential barrier to efforts to reintroduce victim-oriented criminal penalties is that we don't know why they were abandoned and therefore can't know that the reasons weren't good and still applicable. Can anyone direct me to better-documented accounts of such transitions in other legal systems. I was thinking first of straight parallels in Europe, particularly in Switzerland and Poland, where the political economy involved might be especially and interestingly different. But I would be interested in accounts of such a change in any system, including systems which were changed by the introduction of or where compensation coexisted with "Western" law. Yours Sincerely, Alan E. Dunne
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