2015法律英语试题

Answer the following questions according to the texts that you have learned this semester.
1. What’s the paralegal; explain the role of the paralegal in the
legal environment?
2. Describe the purpose of a petition for writ of certiorari.
3. Explain how the concept of precedent or stare decisis operates
today.
4. Identify the categories of primary and secondary legal research
sources.
5. Describe some of the major ethical rules that govern legal
professionals.
Translation
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 consequence of the jury system, in which panels of lay persons were used to decide cases. 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 case on the pleadings. If, however, the pleadings established that the case turned on a question of fact, the case was sent for resolution at trial by a jury composed 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 case 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 close vicinity of the events giving rise 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 ceased 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 these lay judges about the matter they were being asked to decide.
The physical control of a thing by a person is what is normally known as possession, and if the idea of possession had remained wedded to physical control, the position would have been simple enough. But the widening sphere of legal activity made it necessary to attribute to persons who were not actually in physical control some or all of the advantages enjoyed by persons who were.
There are three possible situations at law:
(a) A person can have physical control without legal possession, as in the case of a porter carrying a traveler’s suitcase in a station.
(b)A person can have possession and its advantages without actual physical control, e.g. a person may have books at home which are still in his possession even when he is away on holiday.
(c) A person can have both physical control and possession, e.g. a watch in his pocket or a lien in his hand.
Possession, therefore, has acquired a technical legal meaning, and the separation of possession from physical control has given the concept a high degree of flexibility.
The old theory of possession, derived from the Roman Law, relies upon (a) corpus, i.e. physical control, and (b) animus, i.e. the intention to exclude others. But although these concepts help in deciding possession, they do not provide the complete answer. In fact, English law has never worked out a completely logical and exhaustive definition of possession. The handing over of a key may be sufficient by itself to pass the possession of the contents of a room or box if it provides the effective means of control over the goods.。