Civil Disputes between the State and Individuals in the Ottoman Nizamiye Courts

Abstract

is article is a first exploration of Ottoman civil litigation involving state agencies and private litigants, following the foundation of the Nizamiye court system in the second half of the nineteenth century. I argue that new judicial mechanisms allowed both the state and private individuals to contest each other in financial matters. Due to the high cost of the Nizamiye judicial process, however, the opportunity to challenge the state in the civil courts was limited to individuals who possessed significant financial assets. By the same token, the resources available to the state bolstered its ability to secure tax revenues by resorting to civil litigation.

Conflict Between Defendants and Victims and State Intervention in Late Ottoman Crete

“…I propose that in the case of Crete honor was not related to a weak state but had more to do with ingrained concepts of public and private against the backdrop of the Ottoman state's legal reform.4 In 1840, penal reform made such crimes as homicide and bodily injury, which were prosecuted privately before the first imperial penal code of 1840, a matter of public security and thus the object of state intervention (Peters 2005;Aykut 2016). However, courts gave people a different way not only of resolving matters with each other, but a platform to air grievances, either directly or indirectly, with state intervention (Rubin 2012).…”

“…The imperial Ceride-i Mehakim (Journal of the Courts) was a testament to the public nature of crime in this period (Levy-Aksu 2015). The creation of the new office of the public prosecutor also illustrated this change; the prosecutor had the role of both representing the state and overseeing the correct implementation of procedure according to the new codes (Peters 2005;Rubin 2011). The fact that certain acts of violence, such as homicide and bodily injury, moved to the so-called public realm illuminated the expanded role of the state in managing violent crime.…”

What excludes women from landownership in Turkey? Implications for feminist strategies

“…A historical sociology based case study method is used to identify the reasons for women's exclusion from landownership. Avi Rubin (2012a) emphasises that the perceived opposition of the secular versus the religious courts obscures the integrated nature of the nineteenth-century Ottoman legal system. Engaging with his argument, I propose that thinking through the similar opposition of the secular versus the religious civil code limits assessment of continuities and discontinuities within the patriarchal character of the legal systems.…”