Under Maria Theresa, the provincial courts in Moravia continued to operate along the lines set out in the judicial reforms of 1620-1650. Although the reform efforts of the Theresian system had little direct effect on them, the character of these courts did gradually change. By the early 1740s they were inundated with a backlog of unresolved cases that rendered them slow and unwieldy. Following the cancellation of inactive disputes, however, the number of open cases started to drop rapidly, and by the 1760s the provincial court was accepting an absolute minimum of new lawsuits. This was due less to any restrictions imposed by the state than to a lack of interest among the nobility in pursuing claims in the court. The provincial court continued to sit twice a year, but the reduction in the number of cases meant that the number of sessions in each judicial period also fell considerably. The nearly fifty cases heard by the provincial court in the reign of Maria Theresa were, however, similar in scope to those we are familiar with from the preceding period - property-related lawsuits among the nobility, disputes between monasteries and towns, criminal cases and claims by subject communities against their own landlords. Significant changes can also be discerned in the makeup of the courts, with judges being appointed on the basis of their legal training rather than their social standing or other "merits" and, generally, a far closer correspondence to other types of Theresian court, particularly the royal tribunal. There thus ceased to be a meaningful distinction between the royal and provincial judicial systems in the Theresian period., Jiří David., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
In the Habsburg lands at the turn of the 19th century (as a consequence of Enlightenment critique of the legal, social and medical status quo), a change occurred in attitudes to voluntary death. This "new discourse" permeated all state-controlled institutions, being particularly evident in the transformation of teaching practice at medical schools and the introduction of new measures concerning self-willed death. This paper considers the reception of newly-introduced reforms - especially in law and medicine - in the Litoměřice region, and the impact of these changes on the way a suicide’s body was treated and where it was laid to rest. It addresses the question of how much and in what way official and medical investigations of suicides changed, which institutions were involved in such investigations, and how information was exchanged between the various judicial authorities. As a result of ever-closer collaboration between state institutions on the one hand and medical practitioners on the other, suicide in the Litoměřice region in the first half of the 19th century was, de facto, gradually decriminalized., Tereza Liepoldová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy