2014年法律英语翻译大赛初赛试卷
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第五届“华政杯”全国法律翻译大赛初赛试题
试题一(325 words)
The U.S. Supreme Court has not squarely confronted the death penalty's constitutionality since the 1970s. In that decade, the Court actually ruled both ways on the issue. In McGautha v. California,the Court first held in 1971 that a jury's imposition of the death penalty without governing standards did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clau. But then in 1972, in the landmark ca of Furman v. Georgia,the Court interpreted the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clau to hold that death ntences—as then applied—were unconstitutional. In that five-to-four decision, delivered in a per curiam opinion with all nine Justices issuing parate opinions, U.S. death penalty laws were struck down as violations of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The ntences of the “capriciously lected random handful” of tho ntenced to die, one of the Justices wrote, are “cruel and unusual in the same way being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual.” Oth
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er Justices also emphasized the arbitrariness of death ntences, with some focusing on the inequality and racial prejudice associated with them.
爱上千金美眉Four years later, the Supreme Court reverd cour yet again, approving once more the u of executions. After thirty-five states reenacted death penalty laws in the wake of Furman,the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of death penalty statutes in Gregg v. Georgia and two companion cas. The Court ruled that laws purporting to guide unbridled juror discretion—and requiring capital jurors to make special findings or to weigh “aggravating”versus “mitigating”circumstances—withstood constitutional scrutiny. The Court in Gregg emphasized that the Model Penal Code itlf t standards for juries to u in death penalty cas. Only mandatory death ntences, the Court ruled that year, were too vere and thus unconstitutional. In its decision in Woodson v. North Carolina, the Court explicitly ruled mandatory death ntences, the norm in the Framers' era, were no longer permissible and had been “rejected” by American society “as unduly harsh and unworkably rigid.”
试题二(348 words)
The main features of the Anglo-American civil trial developed in the practice of the English common law courts in medieval and early modern times, as a conquence of the jury system, in which panels of lay persons were ud to decide cas. Legal professionals—judges and lawyers—operated the initial pleading stage of the procedure, which was meant to identify and to narrow the dispute between the parties. If the dispute turned on a matter of law—that is, on a question such as whether the complaint stated a legally actionable claim, or whether some particular legal rule governed—the professional judges decided the ca on the pleadings. If, however, the pleadings established that the ca turned on a question of fact, the ca was nt for resolution at trial by a jury compod of citizens untrained in the law. So tight was the linkage between trial and jury that there was in fact no such thing as nonjury trial at common law. In any ca involving a disputed issue of fact, bench trial was unknown until the later nineteenth century.
In the early days of the jury system, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, jurors were drawn from the clo vicinity of the events giving ri to the dispute, in the expectation that the jurors would have knowledge of the events, or if not, that the jurors would be able
to investigate the matter on their own in advance of the trial. Medieval jurors came to court mostly to speak rather than to listen—not to hear evidence, but to report a verdict that they had agreed upon in advance. Across the later Middle Ages, the jury cead to function in this way for complex reasons, including cataclysmic demographic dislocations following the Black Death of the 1340s and the effects of urbanization in producing more impersonal social relations. By early modern times, jurors were no longer expected to come to court knowing the facts. The trial changed character and became an instructional proceeding to inform the lay judges about the matter they were being asked to decide.杨绛先生语录
飞越老人院观后感试题三(358 words)
qq电脑管家下载Among businessmen and lawyers familiar with commercial practice in complex transactions on both sides of the Atlantic, it is a common obrvation that a contract
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drafted in the United States is typically vastly more detailed than a contract originating in Germany or elwhere on the Continent.
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Why are American contracts so much more detailed than European? The Belgian legal writer Georges van Hecke discusd this subject in a stimulating paper that is now a quarter-century old. He offered three explanations. 1. Perfectionism.Van Hecke attributed to the American lawyer a drive “fo r perfection that is not commonly to be found in Europe. The average American businessman is prepared to pay for this perfection in the form of high fees,” while his European counterpart is not. 2. Federalism.Van Hecke directed attention to the multiplicity of American jurisdictions. “An American lawyer, when drafting a contract, does not know in what jurisdiction litigation will ari. He must make a contract that will achieve its purpo in any American jurisdiction.” By contrast, the European lawyer “al ways has in mind the law of one country where the contract is being localized by both choice of law and choice of forum.” 3. Code law versus ca law.The most intriguing of van Hecke's suggestions is that the different American style of contracting is a manifestation of that emingly profound difference between Continental and Anglo-American legal systems: The European private law is codified whereas the American is not. Codification, especially in Germany and in the German-influenced legal
systems, entailed not only a reorganization of the law, but a scientific recasting of legal concepts. “The European lawyer has at his command a store of synthetic concepts, such as 'force majeure'. Their exact meaning may not always be perfectly clear, but they do save a lot of space-consuming enumeration.” By contrast, American lawyers draft to combat “the lawless science of their law, that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances.”Thus, van Hecke obrves, “when a European and an American law yer want to express the same thing, an American lawyer needs far more words.” American contracts are prolix becau American substantive law is primitive.
