INTRODUCTION Section 5(ii) of The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 (HMA) states that under certain circumstances, mental illness is accepted as a ground for the annulment of marriage, while Section 13(1) (iii) states that mental illness is a ground for divorce. There is little data on how this provision is used and applied in matrimonial petitions. This paper assesses judicial practices in divorce case...

Studies of criminal-court dispositions have traditionally aggregated courts along political and geographic boundaries. This article suggests that courts should be analyzed individually, even within the same jurisdiction, as a means of increasing the explanatory capacity of the variables involved. Further, it is contended that intercourt differences are a result of organizational infiuences oper...

The contested custody case has in common with any other case that it is a search for the truth through the medium of the courts. Many modern thinkers believe that the courts are not the proper arena for discovering the truth in all cases. Increasingly, there is agitation to remove areas of testimony from the courts, placing them perhaps in the hands of some commission appointed by government. S...

IN TE landmark decision of Mapp v. Ohio,' which barred for the first time the introduction in state courts of evidence obtained by unconstitutional searches and seizures,2 the Supreme Court did not expressly provide whether the decision was to have retroactive effect. The problem raised by this omission has significance to the substantial number of persons convicted of crimes prior to the Mapp ...

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found th...

Deciding to raise an insanity defense carries serious consequences. This is especially true for persons charged with minor offenses, for whom an acquittal not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) might lead to a longer period of incarceration than would conviction. Before raising an insanity defense, a defendant should be provided with information necessary to make an informed decision and shoul...

Dissent is an integral feature of decision-making in collegial courts. However, unless procedural rules provide for the publication a dissenting opinion and judges make use this opportunity, courts appear to outsiders as impersonal, monolithic institutions. The following contribution explores opinions German subnational constitutional (Landesverfassungsgerichte). Today, most these open opinions...