EUTopia CoLeCo Legal History: The End(s) of War

Introduction Prescription is, in continental criminal law, one of those quiet institutions that everyone accepts without quite knowing why. Time passes, evidence decays, social peace reasserts itself, and the State renounces its right to punish. The 1808 Code d'instruction criminelle fixed the limitation period at twenty years for crimes; the 1958 Code de procédure pénale reproduced the rule almost unchanged. For more than a century and a half, French doctrine treated this temporal extinction as a near-natural feature of criminal repression, to the point that Faustin Hélie could write that prescription belonged to "the necessary order of things".  The Paul Touvier litigation, conducted between 1973 and 1995, broke that quiet consensus. It did so not by abolishing prescription but by forcing French courts to articulate, for the first time in operative terms, what it means for a crime to lie outside the order of time altogether. This article argues that the doctrinal produc...

Introduction and context: the difficulty of building an integrationist project after a devastating war After 1945, Europe was deeply divided, destroyed and unstable, and coal and steel were key resources as they were the backbone of military power. Control over these industries had been a major conflict in both world wars and the Western allies believed something had to be done to prevent another war. In this context, the French government hosted a conference along 5 other European states, resulting in the Treaty of Paris of 1951, by which the European Coal and Steel Community was created with the goal of integrating the aforementioned resources in a single common market to prevent another war and promote trade. Though, in the text itself only the economic face of this goal was mentioned and, as we will see, the focus of the treaty was in many points looking at economic growth more than citizens in this first phase of integration, as per art. 2 of the Treaty: Article 2 of the Treaty of...