Law
Rules, rights and the cases behind them.
“An eye for an eye” was a step forward
Hammurabi’s 3,800-year-old law code sounds brutal, but it was an attempt to make punishment proportionate, public and predictable.
“Happy Birthday” was copyrighted until 2015
For decades, a company collected around $2 million a year in licensing fees for the world’s most-sung song. Then a court found the claim was never valid.
In Britain, it’s an offence to handle salmon in suspicious circumstances
It sounds like a joke law. It’s real, it’s still in force, and it has a sensible purpose.
The country that gave up the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal
The Soviet Union set off 456 nuclear explosions in Kazakhstan. After independence, Kazakhstan closed the test site and gave up about 1,400 nuclear warheads.
The man behind the Miranda warning
“You have the right to remain silent” is named after Ernesto Miranda. He won his Supreme Court case and was convicted again anyway.
The snail in the ginger beer
A woman in Paisley, a bottle of ginger beer and a snail that was never proved to exist became the case on which the modern law of negligence rests.
The Streisand effect
A photo of Barbra Streisand’s house had been downloaded six times. Then she sued to suppress it, and hundreds of thousands of people looked.
The veil of ignorance
Design a society without knowing which person in it you will be, and watch what changes.