Mercedes Of Castile

THE IDEAL REVISION AID FOR YOUR FORTHCOMING LAW EXAMS … WITH SUPPORTING WEBSITEAn appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green ChambersWe know any number of barristers, not to mention solicitors who would have dearly loved to have had this pocket sized guide to hand when they were studying to acquire a legal qualification. If you are a member of the current crop of law students reading for your law degree and/or the CPE/GDL, rejoice. This is as handy, succinct, yet comprehensive guide to the English legal system as you’ll find anywhere. We would venture to say, no student should be without it. Seasoned practitioners too will find it useful as an instantly accessible reminder either for themselves or colleagues -- and the companion website is invaluable.‘English Legal System 2010-2011’ covers the key examinable areas of the undergraduate law curriculum and the law conversion courses. As the title indicates, it’s completely up to date, with new tables of cases, for ease of reference. Revision tips abound, with revision checklists covering those topics you will need to know for examinations and there are summaries of those key cases that are most likely to come up in those same exams. Material therein includes: the legal profession…the judiciary and judicial decision-making…the criminal courts and court procedure…the civil process…tribunal inquiries and alternative dispute resolution…the jury system and access to justice.Part of the amazingly useful Routledge Lawcards series.this is truly an excellent study guide, with colour coded highlighting, boxed sections, diagrams and bullet point summaries judiciously and logically placed throughout, plus a ‘putting into practice section’ which demonstrates by example how an essay question on an exam paper is supposed to be answered. There’s no easy route to a law qualification, but nonetheless this guide does help you identify and learn the salient points of each area of the law. Check out the companion website for flashcard glossaries of key terms and multiple choice questions designed to help you test your understanding of structures and principles as you progress through the book and you will see how ideal it is for revision when you don’t have lectures.

A ‘MAGNIFICENT AND TIMELY’ WORK CONCERNING PLACES OF REFUGE FOR SHIPS IN DISTRESS An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green ChambersIf you’re professionally involved in the world of shipping, transport and maritime law, whether practitioner, student or academic, you need this invaluable work of reference from Lloyd’s List. It addresses one of the thorniest and most topical issues pertaining to worldwide shipping: the problem of what to do about – and where to put – a vessel foundering in distress off a coastline. Certainly this is a matter that has confounded national and city states since the early days of sail. Significantly in the opening pages, the author quotes Pliny the Younger (who [we believe] chronicled the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 71!) who applauds the construction of a port on the Italian coast (now Citta Vechia) as a safe haven that would save countless lives. Just goes to show how long -- and longer -- the problem has been with us and which, almost two millennia later has acquired new and often horrifying dimensions, due to security issues and the risk of environmental pollution. It is the reluctance of many coastal states to agree to -- and adhere to -- specific legal arrangements for governing ships in distress which persists as a vexed issue worldwide and which the CMI (Comite Maritime International) has sought to address in the form of the CMI draft Instrument.It’s the author, Professor Eric Van Hooydonk, who presented a paper at the 2004 Vancouver Conference entitled ‘The obligation to offer a place of refuge to a ship in distress. A plea for granting a salvage reward to ports and an international convention on ports of refuge.’ This paper has provided the legal underpinning for the work which the CMI continued to do.So, in just under 500 pages, the book presents a detailed analysis of the CMI draft Instrument in all its aspects. At the same time it examines developments within the IMO and European States, together with a review of current international law and a summary of leading papers and commentaries on this topic written over the last twenty years. The scholarship involved is precise and formidable and in this copiously footnoted work, you’ll find the expected and useful research tools, including extensive tables of international instruments, EU legislation and general legislation, as well as Tables of Cases and an extensive bibliography. As is pointed out in the Foreword, this is an invaluable source of information and knowledge, not only about the CMI draft Instrument, but about the ‘enormous international legal source material that exists, but which so far has been very difficult to access’ – as compelling a reason as any to rush out and purchase this book.

Without missing a beat from the last page of the first novel, MILES WALLINGFORD, the follow-on novel to James Fenimore Cooper's AFLOAT AND ASHORE, begins "ashore," on the Hudson River downstream from Albany. Crusty Moses Marble soon happens upon an old lady who turns out to be the mother who had unwillingly abandoned him a half century earlier. Moses discovers his dead sister's daughter at the same time. Suddenly the man apparently once doomed to solitude has a family! By novel's end he has even been "bride's-maid" at Miles's wedding and later captain of newly wealthy Miles's ship, The Sludge, named for the savage Indian chief who had captured them both years earlier on the Oregon coast. *****Back at sea in 1803 his own vessel, Miles sails with cargo for neutral Hamburg. But France and England are at war and his ship is taken prize consecutively by both sides. He makes his daring escapes, but a remaining crew of two whites and two black slaves is not enough to secure his ship from peril of the deep. *****Returned to New York in 1804 after losing everything he owns, including his mortgaged farm, Miles is clapped into debtor's prison. There he is rescued by his still underage childhood sweetheart Lucy Hardinge with help from Andrew Drewett, who loves her. Learning from Drewett that, contrary to what was generally believed, Lucy had never accepted Andrew's proposals of marriage, Miles Wallingford takes heart and asks Lucy to marry him. She wonders what took him so long. ***** Shortly after their nuptials, Lucy's father, Rev. Hardinge also unites in Christian wedlock the slaves Neb and Chloe Clawbonny. Miles immediately grants them their freedom. Yet, as Miles pens his memoirs 40 years later, neither Neb nor Chloe has shown the slightest interest in acting free, much less being free. "He has had no intention to free me, whatever may have been my plans for himself and his race" (Ch.30). ***** As for Miles's saintly sister Grace, she had wasted away and died in 1803, broken-hearted for being jilted by Lucy's brother Rupert Hardinge in favor of the smooth Englishwoman Emily Merton. The dying Grace commands her brother Miles Wallingford to give Rupert $20,000 from her estate, so that he can start a new life properly with his new love. This is perhaps the greatest passage on "love thine enemies" in English literature. ***** The middle 2/3 of MILES WALLINGFORD is spent "Afloat" on the Atlantic. Our hero, along with old salt Moses Marble and Miles's ever faithful slave Neb endure illegal seizures of their neutral vessel on the high seas by both French and English. They effect escapes and survive, either together or separated, titanic gales and a final shipwreck. ***** Once again in New York, his two friends suffer with Miles while he tries to recover his mortgaged farm and to pay his debts. As ruined as Biblical Job, Miles's faith in God, coupled with the help of rich heiress Lucy Hardinge, brings him through terrible downturns to final decades of happy marriage, children and grandchildren. That Lucy is still handsome and ever his loving wife "forms not only the delight but the pride of my life. It is a blessing, for which, I am not ashamed to say, I daily render thanks to God, on my knees. The End." -OOO-

Read three or four chapters of James Fenimore Cooper's 1844 sea adventure, ASHORE OR AFLOAT. That ought to be enough to make you want to read to the end. If that indeed becomes your intention, then lay hands as soon as possible on the novel's "sequel" (more accurately "continuation"), MILES WALLINGFORD. For ASHORE OR AFLOAT leaves its hero, 21 year old Miles Wallingford, close to drowning in the Hudson River in the year 1803. You will want to know what comes next, and only MILES WALLINGFORD will make it happen. ***** This novel is a first person narrative of the early life -- to age 21 -- of Miles Wallingford. Miles and his ethereal sister Grace were orphaned early and left in the care of old family friend and pastor, Anglican Rev. Mr. Hardinge. This saintly widower raises them along with his own two children, Rupert and Lucy. The boys are close in age, so are the girls. When Miles is 17 and Rupert 18, they inform their sisters (also their budding sweethearts respectively) that they are about to run away to sea. And they do. Accompanying them (against his command to return home with the boat that took them down the Hudson from the century old Wallingford family farm, Clawbonny), is Miles's devoted young black slave, Nebuchadnezzar Clawbonny or "Neb" for short. ***** The Wallingfords are comparatively well off, better than yeomen, not quite as high as gentry. The Hardinges are poor, though they live well as stewards in the house of the Wallingfords. Very early we see defects in the character of Rupert Hardinge which do not bode well for the happiness of his sister and two young friends. Rupert is lazy, a liar, albeit charming, a big spender and not shy about taking money that he has not earned. ***** After a year before the mast, the two boys return to the Hudson and to Clawbonny. Rupert accepts his clerical father's wish that he go to Manhattan to study law. Not yet adult Miles is permitted to return to the sea for a two-year merchant marine voyage around the world. Both voyages abound in storms and adventures. It is a time of war with France and there are naval engagements, too. A key new character introduced is aging seaman Moses Marble. Initially a first mate, Moses through tragedy becomes a captain and is eventually at his own request marooned on an island in the Pacific. He is something of a somewhat crude but good-hearted father figure to Miles Wallingford. Two other important characters, eventually rescued by Miles and crew from the French, are British half-pay Major Merton and his beautiful daughter Emily. ***** When Miles finally returns from the sea to Manhattan, he finds the friend of his youth Rupert Hardinge now admitted to the New York bar and living well beyond his means in Town. Rupert also seems to have given over his earlier love for Miles's sister Grace in favor of the more polished Miss Emily Merton. Grace feels betrayed. Her always frail constitution gives way and she appears near death. Meanwhile Miles finally realizes that he loves Lucy Hardinge as much more than the virtual sister he was raised with. Yet he finds Lucy living well in Manhattan and hotly pursued by well off Andrew Drewett. At novel's end, Miles and Andrew are being saved from drowning far up the Hudson on a cruise to Albany. ***** AFLOAT AND ASHORE is told by Miles Wallingford looking back in old age on a long life. He compares New York of 1797 and 1803 with the same State in 1844. In 1803 Miles, his dying sister and Lucy sail up the Hudson to Albany on doctor's orders. Only four years later the first steamboat will sail the same waters. In old age Miles compares the passing age of sail with the rising age of steam. ***** Slavery is not yet ended in New York and Miles speaks with affection of the numerous blacks on his farm. We also see the interaction of Dutch, Yankees from New England and socially climbing English in and around New York. By novel's end, a reader will have sailed vicariously through the stormy Straits of Magellan and developed quite a feel for early 19th century navigation, tides, currents, winds and the unpredictable vicissitudes that thousands of sailors of all nations would have had to face. -OOO-

James Fenimore Cooper died in 1851, aged 61. THE WAYS OF THE HOUR novel (1850) was his last full-length fictional production. ***** It is a very good but decidedly odd work of fiction. ***** Let me begin with a sketch of the plot. In a fictional Dukes County not far from New York City a residence is burned. Two corpses, mere skeletons, are found in the cottage's main downstairs bedroom. A very high class, wealthy but mysterious American woman boards there in a small garret. She escapes with her life. But a grand jury is persuaded to indict her for arson and murder of the old couple who lived there. A great New York City lawyer, Thomas Dunscomb, defends her. She complicates her defense by refusing to gives details of her past. The lawyer ultimately finds out her secret. The trial ends with a jury giving contradictory verdicts. *** THE WAYS OF THE HOUR (another phrase for "the signs of the times") also contains stories of the romances and marriages of six people: two old, four young. ***** This novel is, in addition, a vehicle for dialogs and far-ranging authorial editorializing about the general decay of virtue and manners in the USA since independence. Some examples: (1) Spitting and blowing one's nose without a handkerchief are now widespread. (2) The New York State Constitution, as recently amended in 1846, is excessively democratic, in the view of very conservative lawyer Dunscomb. One grave error, important to the plot, guarantees married women the right to hold their own inherited property and not turn it over to their husbands. ***** The novel also explores madness, its degrees, its effects on character, how to recognize it and how to cure it or at least circumscribe its effects. There is considerable discussion of slavery, no longer legal in New York State, but still constitutionally protected in the American South. THE WAYS OF THE HOUR is an informative snapshot of New York in the late 1840s. -OOO-

Fictitious hot-headed, adventure-loving, gallant young Count Luis de Bobadilla is the only Spanish grandee to accompany Christopher Columbus on his first (1492 - 1493) voyage to the New World and back to Spain. Luis undertakes this incognito role in order to convince Queen Isabella of Castile that he is worthy to marry the rich, beautiful Castilian heiress Mercedes de Valverde. ***** While on Haiti, Luis becomes friend of a local sub-king, or cacique, and leads a fight against raiding Caribs intent on stealing the cacique's beautiful sister, Princess Ozema and forcing them to marry their leader. All parties agree that for her safety, the princess will return to Spain with Columbus, among the natives selected for presentation to Queen Isabella. Ozema reminds Luis powerfully of his absent love, Mercedes, and he treats her with love and respect. As she rapidly learns Castilian Spanish, the Haitian princess falls in love with Luis. When, thinking they are about to die at sea in a storm, Luis gives Ozema a diamond-studded cross (next best thing to baptizing the pure souled heathen), the princess at once believes that they are now man and wife. *****Neither Mercedes nor Queen Isabella is the least amused when they find that Ozema thinks she is Luis's wife. Saintly Isabella does her best to explain things to Ozema. Ozema agrees to be baptized but only if Luis and Mercedes are married first. She then asks to become Luis's second, subordinate wife. The archbishop on hand is incensed. And Queen Isabella wonders about the wisdom of her plan to bring the religion of Jesus to the New World. -OOO-