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To: WFTR
Tortoise's response may be interesting but it's delusory. Christianity had spread to Great Britain long before English Common Law was set down in writing. Quickening, or the moment the mother can first feel fetal movement, was part of ancient Judaic and other near east laws as the moment after which the fetus was treated as an individual. In English Common Law, then, abortion post-quickening was ruled homicide.

Quickening, today, also refers to the first audible fetal heart beat.

249 posted on 03/11/2003 10:14:09 AM PST by Nebullis
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To: Nebullis; WFTR
Tortoise's response may be interesting but it's delusory. Christianity had spread to Great Britain long before English Common Law was set down in writing.

Hardly delusory, and you used weasel words in your assertion to avoid acknowledging the fact. To this day there is no written codified version of English Common Law. The first attempt at recording a unified body of precedent throughout the kingdoms happened only a few hundred years after the first Christian missionaries came to the British Isles, somewhere around the 11th century. Before the Common Law unification, it was practiced throughout the isles with only minor local variation between regions well into pre-history. The first attempts at codifying and centralizing legal procedure happened in the 12th century, but is known to have existed in essentially its current form at least several hundred years before the first Christian missionaries showed up in the region.

The exact origins of English Common Law are unknown primarily because it existed long before written histories of the region existed in any meaningful sense. The Christian missionaries (from which we get much of our early recorded history of the region) clearly indicate it was a strong and old institution when they showed up. The Normans, which didn't show up until a good four hundred years after the missionaries showed up, were the first to make a concerted effort to create a thorough written record of this ancient legal tradition.

So Nebullis, are you actually going to assert that English Common Law didn't exist before the Norman invaders made the first comprehensive written documentation of it? Did the English language not exist before the first dictionary? Most of what we know about ancient England is invaders and other people wrote about it. There is no written record of anybody invading or visiting the islands before English Common Law was an ancient institution there. Thanks for playing, but try again.

250 posted on 03/11/2003 11:41:22 AM PST by tortoise
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