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Society

1,109 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 19.

481. Feeling safe and being safe are often two different thingsPeople can feel protected while exposed, or anxious while perfectly safe. Americans commonly dread dying in an earthquake, yet falls on bathroom floors kill more of them. And a co…
482. On England's eighteenth-century south coast, smuggling outearned farming and fishingDaniel Defoe, visiting Lymington in 1724, found almost no foreign trade except smuggling and roguing, which he said dominated the whole English coast from the Thames to Land's End…
483. Written laws pile up until someone has to reorganise themEvery legislature eventually faces the same mess. Acts get published in order of passage, starting as a slim shelf and swelling as lawmakers respond to each new crisis. Before lon…
484. Is a motorcycle a motor vehicle? Judges settle such puzzles dailySuppose a law says every motor vehicle on public roads must be registered, but never defines the term. A rider fined for an unregistered motorcycle argues it does not qualify. Now…
485. Why many European lawyers are still addressed as doctorThe first university degrees, beginning at Bologna's law school in the eleventh century, were law doctorates. That is why lawyers in Portugal, Italy, Malta and much of South Ameri…
486. Roman soldiers shared plunder equally, even with comrades who stayed behindPolybius described strict rules for sacking a conquered city. Never more than half the Roman troops gathered booty while the rest held key positions, and afterwards tribunes sold …
487. Magna Carta failed within months, and its fame is partly a mythKing John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. Neither side kept its promises, the Pope annulled the charter, and civil war followed. I…
488. France needed four failed drafts before the Napoleonic Code finally passedRevolutionary France promised a single civil code for the whole country in 1791, yet draft after draft collapsed: one was too technical, one too brief, one never debated. Only aft…
489. A snail in a ginger beer bottle created the modern law of negligenceIn a café in Paisley, May Donoghue poured the rest of a ginger beer over her ice cream and saw what looked like a decomposed snail slide out. She could not sue the café, since her…
490. Criminal gangs face the same management trade-offs as ordinary companiesSome criminal groups run like rigid corporations, with job divisions, written rules and orders flowing down from the top. That structure carries real weaknesses: messages can be i…
491. The word pirate began as a Greek term for someone who triesBehind the English word pirate sits a Greek noun meaning brigand, built on a verb for attempting. Literally, a peiratēs was anyone having a go at something. Early English writers …
492. Why common law judges look backward before they decideA judge in a common law country rarely starts from scratch. Earlier rulings on similar questions act as authority, and lower courts must follow those from above. Yet only the core…
493. An Old Bailey barrister coined the phrase presumed innocent until proven guiltyThe familiar words presumed innocent until proven guilty were coined by the British barrister William Garrow during a 1791 trial at the Old Bailey. He insisted that accusers be te…
494. International law works with no police force and no final judgeTreaties between states stretch back to about 3100 BCE, when the Mesopotamian cities of Lagash and Umma made peace. Yet international law still has no universal authority to enfor…
495. How you address a judge reveals a country's legal historyIn India, lawyers were long expected to call senior judges My Lord. In 2006 the national bar council declared such phrases relics of the colonial past and approved Your Honour ins…
496. A rediscovered Roman law book reshaped European courts after 1070When Justinian's great compilation of Roman law resurfaced around 1070, scholars at Bologna began teaching it. Their glosses, memory aids and debating methods revived Roman law ac…
497. Is an unjust law still a law? Legal philosophers still disagreeAn old maxim says an unjust law is no law at all. Natural law thinkers from Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas broadly agreed, holding that valid law must answer to reason and moral…
498. Early English jurors were chosen because they already knew the factsMedieval English juries were not neutral strangers. Jurors were recruited from the neighbourhood of a dispute precisely because they were expected to know what had happened before…
499. Is something good because gods command it, or commanded because it is good?Plato's dialogue Euthyphro poses a riddle still debated: is goodness commanded by the gods because it is good, or good merely because they command it? If the second, justice escap…
500. The Lindbergh case turned kidnapping into a job for the FBIAfter the heavily publicised Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932, Congress passed the Federal Kidnapping Act, letting the FBI investigate such cases just as the bureau was growing in siz…
501. Nobody has managed to define law, and some say we should keep tryingScholars have hunted for a universally acceptable definition of law and failed. One jurist argued the word means different, even irreconcilable, things in different settings. Thur…
502. Most American lawsuits end without ever reaching a trialAround 98 percent of civil cases in American federal courts are resolved without a trial. Even so, litigation can sprawl into a maze of claims, counterclaims and extra parties, ra…
503. Some identity thieves steal a name just to dodge an arrestNot every identity thief wants your money. Some give a stolen name to police when they are arrested, so the charges land on someone else. The real person may only find out years l…
504. Tobacco and opium were the first drugs governments tried to banLong before modern drug laws, tobacco smoking was outlawed by authorities in Russia, Austria, Germany, New Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and Qing emperors banned opium smoking in …
505. Should you save a great archbishop or your own mother from a fire?In 1793 William Godwin argued that if a fire forced you to choose between the archbishop Fénelon, whose work helps many, and a chambermaid, you should save Fénelon, even if the ch…
506. Nobody is legally an heir until the moment someone diesIn law you cannot be an heir while the person you expect to inherit from is still alive, because the exact list of who qualifies is fixed only at death. Until then, royal families…
507. Courts once used injunctions to break strikes, then to desegregate schoolsAn injunction is a court order telling someone to act or to stop, backed by the threat of contempt, fines or jail. American judges used this tool first against striking unions aro…
508. Venice wrote the first patent law in 1474, and its rules still holdOn 19 March 1474 the Republic of Venice offered protection for any new and ingenious device that was useful and had not been made before. That short statute is usually considered …
509. Some rights in this treaty survive even a national emergencyGovernments that ratify the civil rights covenant may suspend some of its guarantees when an emergency threatens the nation's life. A handful stay untouchable no matter what: the …
510. One human rights treaty became two because nations disagreed on prioritiesThe United Nations originally planned a single binding treaty of human rights. Members split over whether freedoms from state interference or guarantees like food and schooling ma…
511. From the Domesday Book to Firebaugh's rule that research should be able to surprise youSociologist Glenn Firebaugh opened his Seven Rules for Social Research with an unusual demand: a study should leave room for surprise. His warning targets researchers who never lo…
512. The founders of social theory were mostly outsiders with no university jobsSaint-Simon, Comte, Marx, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer shaped how we think about society, yet none of them ever held a university post. In their day they counted as philos…
513. Twins reach for each other in the womb long before anyone teaches them mannersUltrasound studies of twin pregnancies found that from the 14th week of gestation, twin foetuses make movements aimed specifically at each other, and these contacts grow longer an…
514. Four rival lenses sociologists use, and the three questions they all chaseSpencer's favourite image treated society as a living body, with norms and institutions working like organs to keep the whole healthy. That organic analogy became the backbone of …
515. Sociology got its name in an unpublished manuscript and its first department in ChicagoThe French essayist Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès first wrote the word sociology in 1780, in a manuscript he never published. Auguste Comte arrived at it independently in 1838, partly be…
516. Are you steering your life, or is society steering you?James Coleman sketched a boat to answer one of sociology's oldest puzzles. A large-scale condition prompts individual people to act; their combined actions then produce a new larg…
517. Punk's safety pins and the long academic argument over what subcultures meanStudying British punk in the late 1970s, Dick Hebdige compared its style to Duchamp's ready-mades, ordinary objects turned into art simply by being chosen. Clothes pegs, safety pi…
518. Before Comic-Con there were Janeites, and mourners for a fictional detectiveWhen Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893, readers staged public displays of mourning for a man who never existed. Within a few years some were writing their own …
519. Why sociologists distrust neat labels like Generation X and MillennialsIn rich countries the average gap between parents and children has stretched into the high twenties, reaching 30 years in some places, while in poorer nations it still sits in the…
520. How the law sorts one act into murder, manslaughter or no crime at allLegally, homicide means only that one person caused another's death, whether by an act or a failure to act. No intent is required, so an accident can qualify. What happens next de…
521. Did factories shrink the family, or did small families build the factories?Sociologist Talcott Parsons argued that industry created the nuclear family. Historians have pushed back hard. Peter Laslett found most households in pre-industrial England were a…
522. Kindergarten peer monitors tamed disruption better than teachers could aloneIn a remedial kindergarten class at the University of Kansas, three especially disruptive children calmed down once teachers began awarding points for good behaviour. Then the bes…
523. What holding power does to your mind, and why Gramsci pictured it as a centaurGain power and, according to psychologist Dacher Keltner's approach/inhibition theory, you become bolder, quicker to speak, happier and more optimistic. You also grow likelier to …
524. A river, dripping water and a clash of opposites: old models of how societies changeHeraclitus observed that fresh water keeps flowing past anyone who steps into the same river. His point seems to be that the river stays a river only because it never stops changi…
525. A disapproving look can govern behaviour more firmly than any written lawAt a Women's Institute meeting, a single disapproving look can tell someone that flirting with the minister is off limits. In a criminal gang, threatening to go to the police invi…
526. What turns a queue at a bus stop into an actual groupPeople waiting together at a bus stop share a place and a purpose, yet sociologists do not call them a group. A group needs members who interact, share traits and feel some unity.…
527. Money, marriage and medieval knights exist only because enough of us agreePhilosopher John Searle listed marriage, property, cocktail parties, parliaments, taxes and medieval knights as things that exist only through shared human agreement. None is made…
528. Why England ran a second court system to fix the first one's rigid rulesIn 1818 Lord Eldon vowed that Chancery would never deserve the old jibe that its justice varied like the length of the Chancellor's foot. That insult captured a real problem. Engl…
529. Why English-speaking courts built so many rules about what a jury may hearA treatise on American evidence law by John Wigmore ran to ten volumes, and in 1898 James Bradley Thayer noted that even English lawyers found the American rules bewildering. That…
530. The quiet crimes of money, from insider tips to trillions washed cleanOver 17 years, lawyer Matthew Kluger fed confidential deal information into a $37 million insider trading scheme, and in 2012 he received a record 12-year prison sentence. His cas…
531. From dry mouths and Song dynasty flies to arsenic tests in the courtroomIn ancient India, some accused people were handed a mouthful of dry rice and told to spit it back. The idea had a grain of logic: fear dries up saliva, so a guilty person might st…
532. How different countries price a lie told for money, from yuan bands to estafaA 2010 survey of fraud examiners estimated that the typical organisation loses five percent of its yearly revenue to deception, with a median loss of 160,000 dollars. Frauds by ow…
533. Religious liberty was coined by a Roman-era Christian writing from the losing sideThe earliest known use of the phrase freedom of religion, libertas religionis, comes from Tertullian, a Christian writer in the Roman world. His case was bold: worship follows con…
534. The printing press made free speech a fight, and a Finnish priest helped win itIn 1766 Sweden passed one of the world's first laws protecting a free press, pushed through largely by Anders Chydenius, a liberal priest and member of parliament from Ostrobothni…
535. One Swiss businessman's battlefield visit grew into the most ratified rules of warAfter the Battle of Solferino in 1859, Geneva businessman Henry Dunant found some 40,000 wounded soldiers left on the field with no medics, supplies or truce to reach them. His 18…
536. Why a law court and courting someone share the same enclosed yardThe word court began as an enclosed yard, where a medieval sovereign and his entourage gathered to settle disputes. People travelled there to win the ruler's favour, which is why …
537. A crime usually needs two things at once: a guilty act and a guilty mindMost crimes require proof of both actus reus, the guilty act, and mens rea, the guilty mind. Swing a belt at one person, miss, and hit a bystander, and the law simply moves your i…
538. When does a habit become a law? Customary law tries to answerPlenty of people do the same thing out of habit, but only some shared behaviour counts as law. Customary law is the set of practices a community treats as binding, and the tricky …
539. A fake Rolex shows why suing in contract or tort changes the payoutBuy an antique Rolex for 100 pounds, discover it is a 50-pound fake, and learn the genuine watch would fetch 500. A contract claim gets you 450 pounds, the value you were promised…
540. Lafayette drafted France's 1789 rights declaration with Thomas Jefferson at his sideThe first drafts of France's great charter of rights were written by the Marquis de Lafayette in consultation with his friend Thomas Jefferson, then the American envoy in Paris. A…

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