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

The purpose of our research project for Eutopia was to examine how Franco used law as a means of legitimising and entrenching repression of the internal enemies during and after the Spanish Civil War.  In our research, we focused primarily on the role of military trials, and special jurisdictions introduced, such as the one created by the Ley de Responsabilidades Políticas 1939 , as we wanted to illustrate and emphasise how arbitrary terror was used to enforce the regime.  We used Ernst Fraenkel’s concept of a dual state, where terror and normality coexist in the same legal system. We wanted to identify how Franco’s regime fulfilled this concept, and felt the military trials and extraordinary jurisdictions demonstrated this arbitrary terror most explicitly.  Our research also included an analysis of civil law as a means of repression, which, due to time constraints, didn’t feature in our presentation. However, this report contains a brief section on this area of law, as i...

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...