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Abstract: At least since the late 1960s, comparatists have been questioning the division of civil law jurisdictions into the German and French families, bearing in mind ongoing processes of amalgamation. Polish law is an example of a mixture, which firstly derives from the unique historical creation of the body of the legal system after First World War, which, in essence, survived until today. Further mixtures, being more typical to all European jurisdictions, were introduced through more or less massive transplants that related to the harmonization demands of the EU. Thirdly, the mixture was effected through the bottom-up process of Anglo-Saxonization of law, especially in its contractual dimension. Résumé: Au moins depuis la fin des années soixante, les comparatistes se sont interrogés sur la division des systèmes de droit civil en familles allemandes et françaises, tout en gardant à l'esprit les processus d'intégration actuellement en cours. Le droit polonais est un exemple d'un mélange, qui provient tout d'abord de la création historique unique du corps du système juridique après la première guerre mondiale, qui, pour l'essentiel a survécu jusqu'à aujourd'hui. D'autres mélanges, plus typiques de tous les systèmes de droits européens, ont été introduits au travers de transpositions plus ou moins massives dues à une exigence d'harmonisation de l'UE. Troisièmement, le mélange s'est effectué sous la forme du processus, partant du bas vers le haut, de l''anglo-saxonisation' du droit, spécialement en matière contractuelle.

Emperor Dušan's Code is the most important legal document of medieval Serbia, which is often considered to be the early Serbian "constitution". It is largely based on the Byzantine legal tradition, which entailed a rigorous system of criminal sanctions and diverse forms of punishment: death penalty by hanging and burning, mutilation of body parts, blinding, branding, scorching, cruel corporal punishment (beating, flogging), imprisonment, severe fines, confiscation of property, exile or banishment and dislocation as a form of collective punishment for the subjects. In this article, the author of presents and analyzes relevant provision of Dušan's Code, dealing with the envisaged criminal sanctions and different forms of punishment which were imposed on the perpetrators of criminal offences. The research methodology is based on normative, dogmatic and historical methods. Based on this analysis and comparison with the positive criminal legislation of the Republic of Serbia, the author concludes that Dušan's Code prescribed much more rigorous criminal sanctions, particularly given the fact that the current legislation law does not envisage death penalty and severe corporal punishment.

This paper contributes to the literature on specific deterrence by addressing the issue of selecting adolescents into adult and juvenile law systems. In Germany, different from the U.S. and most other countries, turning a critical cutoff age does not cause a sharp discontinuity from juvenile to adult penal law, but rather implies a shift to a discretionary system of both adult and juvenile law, dependent on the courts' impression of moral and mental personal development of the adolescent at the time of the act. The German legal system draws the line of adulthood at some fuzzy age interval between 18 and 21, which is well above the thresholds prevailing in the U.S. (16 to 18 years, state specific) and other countries. Thus, the German evidence entails some external evidence to the previous literature mostly relying on U.S. data. Based on a unique inmate survey and Two-Equation Models controlling for selectivity problems, results show that application of adult criminal law instead of juvenile penal law decreases expected recidivism of adolescents. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]