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The relevance of the subject under study was conditioned by the fact that in Ukrainian judicial practice, both judges and experts who are members of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Supreme Court have differed in their opinions regarding the possibility of disqualifying an heir from inheritance based on the requirements of Article 1224, Part 1 of the Civil Code of Ukraine. The purpose of this study was to clarify such general legal issues as the applicability and extension of the presumption of innocence in civil proceedings, and protection against violation of this principle in the resolution of certain civil law disputes. The methods of analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalisation, and case study were employed to examine the decisions of national courts of general jurisdiction of various instances, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, and the European Court of Human Rights. It was stated that the deceased heir – the accused, who inflicted serious bodily injuries to his father – the testator, as a result of which the latter died, cannot be considered as having no right to inheritance, based on the analysis of the content of Article 1224, Part 1 of the Civil Code of Ukraine. The study proved that a form of condemnation by public authorities and posthumous conviction outside the scope of due process of law would be establishment by a court in a civil case of the circumstances of intentional deprivation of the testator’s life by an heir, where the former died at the time of the consideration of a civil dispute. It is unacceptable for a civil court to rely on the circumstances of the indictment and the grounds for closing criminal proceedings against a deceased defendant – an heir. Only a guilty verdict establishes a person’s guilt. If it is referred to in other procedural decisions, it is probable that the person will be socially stigmatised. A civil court may not assume the powers of a court that are exercised only in criminal proceedings when resolving a dispute over inheritance. The practical value of the study lies in the development of arguments for the court and participants in the trial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the meaning of the words with intent, destroy, in part or in whole, drawing upon evidence of the Genocide Convention and defends the genocide label as acts of mass killing with the goal of displacement rather than extermination consistent with the lost history of the Convention, and the link of ethnic cleansing to genocide. Topics discussed include intent to destroy in the Bosnia cases, moral coherence of genocide in language and law, and the Convention's drafting history.

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court case Counterman v. Colorado which deals with freedom of speech. Topics mentioned include the definition of stalking and true threats, the explanation of Vonnie's law, the first amendment meaning of intent, and the meaning of recklessness in true threat cases.

The "hard cases" for the law relating to accomplices deal with the definition of what counts as aiding and abetting a crime. A retailer might sell a murder weapon in the ordinary course of business, while an accomplice might do nothing because their help was simply not needed. How do we distinguish between these cases? The Capitol Riot is a striking example of this sort of hard case because there were so many people involved in so many different and ambiguous ways. Outside of the conceptually easy cases of someone caught on camera making off with property or attacking officers, who should be found guilty of what? A lack of a rubric for answering these questions makes collective crimes like the Capitol Riot especially challenging for the law. Drawing on philosophy of action and game-theoretic reasoning, we develop a novel model of complicity built on the concept of standing in reserve and show how it helps to understand joint intention and responsibility in complex social situations, such as those where only a proper subset of participants may actively engage in the primary criminal act. This model of complicity is consistent with the fundamental normative commitments of criminal law, such as the central importance of mens rea and punishing only intentional actions. Standing in reserve thus offers a principled, coherent approach to identifying complicity in these hard cases. Through a series of applications, we show how the standing in reserve model sheds light on the Capitol Riot as well as related controversies including guilt by association, terrorism, and felony murder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how arbitral rules in an unsophisticated arbitration agreement invalidates an employee's clear and unmistakable manifestation of intent to arbitrate questions of arbitrability. Topics discussed include role of delegation clauses in the agreement of parties to arbitrate questions of arbitrability, contract of adhesion theory, doctrine of unconscionability and principles of incorporation by reference, and rebuttable presumption of unsophistication for certain contracts.

There is a dimension of rationality, known as structural rationality, according to which a paradigmatic example of what it means to be rational is not to be akratic. Although some philosophers claim that aesthetics falls within the scope of rationality, a non-akrasia constraint prohibiting certain combinations of attitudes is yet to be developed in this domain. This essay is concerned with the question of whether such a requirement is plausible and, if so, whether it is an actual requirement of aesthetic rationality. Ultimately, this paper defends the view that aesthetics is no different from other domains in that it requires coherence between a subject's mental states (in the aesthetic case, between what is judged and what is aesthetically liked). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the provisions of commercial general liability (CGL) insurance policies, particularly those concerning assault and battery exclusions. Other topics include the expected or intended injury exclusion in standard CGL policies, the conditions where assault and battery can be considered as accidental, and the policies' intentional acts exclusion.

The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive attitudes and factive emotions. Taking into account this sort of causal efficacy in determining which mental states are genuine mental states opens up new perspectives for defending the view that knowledge is the most general factive and genuine mental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On March 9, 2021, in United States v. Lancaster, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that a district court ruling on a First Step Act motion must consider intervening factual and legal developments when deciding whether to resentence an offender under the Act. In doing so, the Fourth Circuit exacerbated a circuit split regarding the proper scope of the First Step Act. Four circuits, led by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, have taken the opposite position and do not allow their district courts to consider intervening circumstances at all. The United States Courts of Appeals for the First, Second, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Tenth, and D.C. Circuits, on the other hand, allow their district courts to consider intervening circumstances but do not require them to do so. Within the latter group, the First Circuit created a two-step framework for ruling on a First Step Act motion where a district court may not consider intervening circumstances when deciding whether to resentence but may do so when actually resentencing. This Comment argues that the Fourth Circuit incorrectly expanded the First Step Act's scope of relief in United States v. Lancaster because it did not properly balance the Act's statutory text with the Act's discretionary grant. Additionally, this Comment argues that the Supreme Court should adopt the First Circuit's two-step framework because that approach best realizes Congress's intent within the Act's textual limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]