Discussions
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A verdict that was right by accident: did the court know he was guilty?
Many years ago, early in my time as a court correspondent, I watched a magistrate convict a young man of a burglary largely on the identification of one witness. The identification was confident, the defence was weak, and I was as satisfied…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Fuller’s King Rex, read by someone who spent thirty-one years in the courts
Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law (1964) opens with a fable about an unhappy king called Rex who fails to make law in eight different ways. He decides cases without general rules. He makes rules but keeps them secret. He legislates retroactively.…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
Thirty-one years of watching courts decide what is ‘reasonable’, and no degrees of truth in sight
Here is something I watched every week in the courts of Punjab. A large part of the work was applying words that have no sharp edges: "reasonable doubt", "sudden provocation", "sufficient cause", "unsound mind". Now I read that fuzzy logic was invented…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
The five rulings, from obligatory to forbidden: why the middle categories are not just extra boxes
Standard deontic logic has three basic statuses: obligatory, forbidden, and permitted. Anything neither obligatory nor forbidden is simply permitted, and that's the end of it. Islamic jurisprudence has five rulings (al-aḥkām al-khamsa). An act is obligatory (wājib), recommended (mandūb), permissible (mubāḥ), disliked…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Al-Shaybani’s siyar and the scholastics reached civilian immunity separately
In retirement I have been reading Majid Khadduri's 1966 translation of al-Shaybani's siyar, published as The Islamic Law of Nations. Al-Shaybani (749–805) was a student of Abu Hanifa, and his work on the siyar is one of the earliest systematic treatments of…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Thirty-one years in the courts: legal causation is not physical causation, and should not be
For thirty-one years I reported on the courts of Lahore for a newspaper, the last ten mostly from the sessions courts. In retirement I am reading the jurisprudence I only skimmed in those years, and causation is where philosophy and the courtroom…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan4 replies -
“But for the defendant’s act”: thirty-one years of counterfactuals from the courtroom
For three decades I reported on judgments that turned on sentences of the form "had the accused not done X, the deceased would not have died". I never asked what such a sentence is. It cannot be checked: the accused did do…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies -
Qiyās, kal va-chomer and legal analogy: defeasible reasoning with centuries of rules
The reasoning I heard most often from the bench, in all my years in court, was neither deduction nor statistics. It was analogy: this case resembles that one in the respect that matters, so it should be decided the same way. Islamic…
Started by Khalid Mahmood Awan5 replies