Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1909. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Religion and Dept. of History, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.(Social Work and Criminology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, 1989. / UMI order no.: 9007572. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 685-705).

The development of criminal punishment for homosexual activity and sodomy in the Czech republic This thesis deals with the development of the criminalization of homosexual intercourse and sodomy in the Czech Republic. The aim of this work is to monitor the development of decriminalization of homosexual intercourse and, marginally, sodomy with an emphasis on the period from 1852 to the present. The work is conceived as an analysis of criminal provisions applicable during the period and at the same time monitoring the circumstances that led to decriminalization. The following are examples of punishments for homosexual conduct and sodomy as stated by selected decisions of the courts. The work is divided into an introduction, followed by the monitored period into four parts, and these parts are divided into sections and subsections, followed by a conclusion. The first part follows the historical period from antiquity to 1852, where each time period is described very briefly, with emphasis on the relevant provisions of penial laws for homosexual intercourse and bestiality. The second part follows the period between 1852 and 1961. This period is already examined in detail, with emphasis on the period of the First Republic, where there were efforts to decriminalize homosexual act and where they conducted...

In the last twenty-five years there has been a boom in scholarship on Charles Brockden Brown that connects his work to social developments that occurred in the early American republic. Brown scholars often read him as a man ahead of his time as his writing addresses, hints at, or even inverts social mores. The scholarship around Brown's novel Edgar Huntly has concentrated on how the narrative addresses westward expansion and white settlers' relationship with Native Americans or the ways in which Edgar Huntly connects to Revolutionary society. Kate Ward Sugar engages with this narrative in a different way, exploring the dynamic of sleepwalking as a way to address male homosocial bonds. Scholars though continue to side step the eroticism within this narrative and the implications of somnambulism's status as a mental illness being tied to an unnamed desire. My thesis will therefore address this gap in the scholarship by integrating a queer and historicist reading of Edgar Huntly to suggest that Brown's use of sleepwalking is done to reflect a social fear of the homoerotic. It is the goal of my thesis to explore Edgar Huntly as a narrative that weaves the danger of sodomy to sleepwalking, suggesting an implicit relationship between madness, illness, and same-sex desire. In order to fulfill this goal this thesis will employ a queer historicist approach, which aims to engage with the ambiguity of Brown's work to reveal insights into the early American republic. After all as Brown wrote in Edgar Huntly, "There are two modes of drawing forth the secrets of another, by open and direct means and by circuitous and indirect" (4). To develop this paper's argument, I will need to explore the casual relationship between the loss of Waldegrave's letters and Edgar's emotional distress as the cause of his sleepwalking. Brown himself described this as, "...a supposition not to be endured. Yet ominous terrors haunted me", as Edgar's dread is fixated upon the potential of an unauthorized reader seeing these texts (91). Furthermore, close readings of Brown's description of Edgar's fixation on Clithero will highlight his unspeakable desire. This relationship will also allow us to later compare their fates as Clithero becomes, "a madman whose liberty is dangerous, and who requires to be fettered and imprisoned as the most atrocious criminal," while Edgar leaves for Europe with his fiancé (193). Finally, drawing upon medical and legal texts from this period will show how Edgar Huntly suggests a pathologization of sexuality within the time period, in particular the developing figure of a secularized sodomite. This reading of Edgar Huntly not only expands the scholarship on sexuality in Brown's writing, but also the history of sexuality, pointing towards a social development currently unexplored by scholars of the early American republic.

Abstract This is a study of law and language; in particular an investigation into the language of judgments. The focus is on judgments as texts authored by judges. The main thinkers chosen as the theoretical basis are not experts in law – Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Norman Fairclough and Hayden White, for example. The reason for this choice is to consider the language of law from insights outside of law. Topics such as rhetoric, narrative, critical discourse analysis, intertextuality, interpretive communities, the monologic voice, oppositional reading, and power relations are seldom found in mainstream legal literature. The position taken is that judgments are texts which are no more privileged (simply because they are legal texts) than any others that a society creates. However, judgments are viewed by some as being special societal texts, coated with a patina of mystique because they are dealing with inviolate legal principles. The patina is removed enough to suggest that judges use various linguistic processes to shape their judgments in ways no different from other authors, notwithstanding that they are writing about ‘the law’. Judges are rhetoricians who use rhetoric to shape the facts, choose the most expedient legal principle, and incorporate views of society expedient to their opinion. The thrust of this study is to locate rhetoric at work within a specific sphere. The corpus consists of forty-four cases over a seventy-five year period dealing with sexual orientation. This area of law was chosen for a number of reasons. It is self-contained and lends itself to detailed examination. The topic is emotive which means more rhetorical techniques are at play than in a fairly technical area of law. There have been significant changes in the way sexual orientation has been treated in law over the years. It is interesting to trace how rhetoric facilitated that change. Lastly, we see how a judicial hegemony deals with an apolitical, splintered minority. Any categorical conclusions are impossible in an exploration of this kind. The findings, however, indicate that judges are not as restricted as is generally considered and that their judgments are shaped by employing linguistic techniques available to writers of both fact and fiction. The intention is to provide a fresh way of reading judgments, where observations gleaned in one area can be applied to other areas of law.

Magister Legum - LLM / The main objective of this paper is to explore the legal status of sodomy laws in three African states (South Africa, Zambia and Namibia) from an international human rights perspective. The paper presents an argument that sodomy laws violate a number of international human rights, most notably the right to equality or non-discrimination and the right to privacy, and that these violations cannot be justified with an appeal to the international human rights of culture and self-determination. In fact, judicial intervention to declare sodomy laws unconstitutional might even be justified purely as a principle of constitutional democracy as such. An argument to this effect is developed in section 2 of the paper.

This thesis describes the creation of the gay and lesbian community in Dallas, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the United States. Employing more than seventy-five sources, this work chronicles the important contributions the gay men and lesbians of Dallas have made in the struggle for gay civil rights. This thesis adds to the studies of gay and lesbian history by focusing on a region of the United States that has been underrepresented, the South. In addition, this work addresses the conflicts that arise within the community between men and women.

Gays, lesbians,and laws that criminalise homosexuality in Africa have been the subject of heated public debate in recent times.Criminalisation and attempts at re-criminalisation of homosexuality in some African countries have generated a lot of debate on the issue.The central theme in these debates has been the justification and maintenance of sodomy laws, as against the argument for the repeal of these laws because it violates the rights of gays and lesbians. / Mini Dissertation (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa. Prepared under the supervision of Prof. Letitia Van Der Poll, Faculty of Law, University of Western Cape, South Africa. 2010. / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM