Программа по формированию навыков безопасного поведения на дорогах и улицах «Добрая дорога детства» 2
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People in law casesSolicitors There are about 66,000 solicitors practicing in England and Wales and they are controlled by their own professional body called the Law Society. To become a solicitor it is usual to have a law degree and then to take a one-year Legal Practice Course. This is followed by two-year training period, previously called “articles”, where the trainee solicitor works in a firm of solicitors or for an organisation such as the Crown Prosecution Service or local or central government. During this two-year period he will be paid, though not at the same rate as a fully qualified solicitor. He will also have to complete a Professional Skills Course, which gives training in interviewing clients and witnesses, negotiating, advocacy and business management including dealing with accounts. Finally the trainee will be admitted as a solicitor by the Law Society and his name will be added to the list or roll of solicitors. Those who have a degree in another subject must take an extra year’s course on law, called the Common Professional Examination, before going on to take the Legal Practice Course. There is also a possible entry route which does not involve taking a degree first, but this is only available to mature students and it takes longer to qualify by this route. The main criticisms of the training process are that, first, many people with good degrees cannot get a place on the Legal Practice Course; secondly, students have to pay the fees for this course and also support themselves during the year it lasts. This problem has occurred because most Local Authorities refuse to give a grant for the Legal Practice Course if the student has already had a grant to do a degree. The result of this is that students from poor families cannot afford to take the course and are therefore prevented from becoming solicitors. Many students from lower-and middle-income backgrounds take out bank loans and by the time they qualify, they may owe thousands of pounds. In order to overcome this problem some universities have started offering a four-year course combining a law degree and a practical course which allows the student to receive a grant for the four-year period. The University of Northumberland was the first to offer this course in 1993, so that the first students to use this route will qualify in 1997. The third criticism is that even after passing the Legal Practice Course students are not qualified as solicitors but must find a training place with a firm of solicitors or other suitable organisation. Not all students will be able to find training places and may be prevented from qualifying as solicitors as a result. In 1993 it was estimated that there were 6,000 applicants and only 3,000 training places available. Barristers There are about 8,000 barristers in independent practice in England and Wales and they are controlled by their own professional body called the General Council of the Bar. To become a barrister it is usual to start by obtaining a law degree; those with a degree in another subject will have to do one-year course on law and pass the Common Professional Examination. In order to go on to the next stage of training it is necessary to join an Inn of Court and be accepted on the Bar’s Vocational Training Course which lasts one academic year. It has become increasingly difficult to obtain a place on this Training Course and the method of selecting students has been criticised. Prior to 1994 it was necessary to have at least a 2(I) pass at degree level. In 1994 the procedure was changed; the grades obtained at A level became more important and critical reasoning tests were introduced. One result of the changes was that students with first class degrees were being refused places and there were many successful appeals against the refusal of a place. The Vocational Training Course concentrates on practical skills, particularly advocacy, and students learn to draft legal documents and present cases in court. As with solicitors there is a financial problem for students doing the Vocational Course since Local Education Authorities rarely give a grant for this stage of training. Joining an Inn of Court and attending there to dine or for weekend courses is compulsory but students may choose which of the four Inns – Lincoln’s Inn, the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn – they wish to join. Judges Judges as a group are also called the judiciary. There are many different levels of judge although the main division is into inferior and superior judges. This may sound an odd way of referring to judges but it reflects the different levels of court in which they sit. Inferior judges include: stipendiary magistrates, district judges, recorders, circuit judges. Superior judges are: the puisne judges who sit in the High Court, the Lords Justices of Appeal in the Court of Appeal, the Law Lords in the House of Lords. To become a judge at any level it is necessary to be either a barrister or a solicitor. The Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 made changes basing qualifications on certificates of advocacy and rights of audience in the courts. In other words, a barrister or solicitor must have been qualified to be an advocate in the court to which he is appointed as a judge. The Courts and Legal Services Act also introduced a type of career structure for judges, with the possibility of being promoted from a lower judicial office to the next one up on the ladder. Prior to the Act it was very rare for a judge to be promoted from one court to a higher court except from the High Court to the Court of Appeal and it was impossible for solicitors to progress further than a circuit judgeship. No matter how good a judge a solicitor was he could not be appointed as a High Court judge; this was clearly wrong as the best judges should be able to be promoted. The first High Court judge to come from solicitor circuit judges was Sir Michael Sachs, who was appointed in 1993. JuryA jury consists of twelve people (jurors’), who are ordinary people chosen at random from the Electoral Register (the list of people who can vote in elections). The jury listen to the evidence given in court in certain criminal cases and decide whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. If the person is found guilty, the punishment is passed by the presiding judge. Juries are rarely used in civil cases. To be eligible for jury service a person must:
These qualifications are set out in the Juries Act 1974, as amended by the Criminal Justice Act 1988. However some people, who qualify under the criteria above, are still not allowed to serve on a jury, because they are disqualified or ineligible for some other reason. Some criminal convictions will disqualify you from serving on a jury, the length of time of the disqualification depending on the sentence given. In addition the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 has disqualified those on bail from sitting as jurors. Those who are ineligible include:
Apart from these groups there are also people who have the right to refuse to do jury service; they are ‘excusable as of right’. This group includes:
The court has an official who is responsible for sending out summons calling people for jury service. This official will have all the electoral registers for the area and he will select names from these in a random manner. In some areas a computer is used to select people’s names, in other areas the court official will look at the registers and choose names at random. Once the names have been chosen, those people are sent jury summons telling them to come to the court on a certain date. The normal length of jury service is two weeks, though jurors are warned that some trials may last longer. More people than are needed are summoned as the court official will not know who is disqualified, ineligible or excusable as of right. If someone is within one of these categories he or she has to declare it and anyone who is disqualified can be fined up to £5,000 for failing to declare that disqualification. There will also be other people who do not want to do jury service and they have to explain their reasons in writing to the court. If they have a sufficiently good reason, they will be excused from doing jury service on that occasion, but may have to do it in the future. Good reasons include being too ill to go to court, business appointments, having a holiday booked or even having an examination to take. This sort of excusal is called a discretionary excusal, since it is up to the court to decide whether that person should be excused or not. If a person is not excused he must attend court on the date given on the summons or risk being fined for failing to do so. The maximum fine for non-attendance is £1,000. The Police Each of Britain’s fifty-two police forces is responsible for law enforcement in its own area. In addition there are various national and regional connections (for example, in areas of training or the transfer of criminal records), and local forces cooperate with each other. Some special services, such as the Fraud Squad (who investigate financial crimes), are available to any local force in England and Wales. In general, however, the local police forces work independently under their own Chief Constables. Each force is maintained by a local police authority. The exception is London, where the Metropolitan Police are responsible to the Home Secretary. Police duties cover a wide range of activities, from traffic control to more specialised departments such as river police. Each independent force has a uniformed branch and a Criminal Investigation Department (CID) with detectives in plain clothes. In addition the police authorities in England and Wales employ 40,000 civilians and nearly 5,000 traffic wardens. Britain has relatively few police – approximately one policeman for every 400 people – and traditionally they are armed only with truncheons except in special circumstances. However, recent years have seen some major changes in police policy in response to industrial disputes and inner city violence in Great Britain. The situation in Northern Ireland, where the Royal Ulster Constabulary are the local police force, has also meant a change in the style of maintaining law and order. In general, there has been increase in the number of special units trained in crowd and riot control and in the use of firearms, a controversial area for the British police. The number of police has risen along with the crime rate. Crime and Punishment About 90% of all crimes are dealt with by magistrates’ courts. Sentences vary a lot but most people who are found guilty have to pay a fine. Magistrates’ courts can impose fines of up to 2,000 pounds or prison sentences of up to six months. If the punishment is to be more severe the case must go to a Crown Court. The most severe punishment is life imprisonment: there has been no death penalty in Britain since 1965. The level of recorded crime and the number of people sent to prison both increased during the 1970s and 1980s. By the end of that period the average prison population was more than 50,000 and new prisons had to be built as overcrowding had become a serious problem. By 1988 the cost of keeping someone in prison was over 250 pound per week, which was more than the national average wage. The United States of AmericaPhysical Geography The country naturally presents a tremendous variety in physical features (and climate), ranging from moist forest to arid desert and bald mountain peaks. Mount McKinley in Alaska at 20,320 feet (6,194 meters) is the highest point in the United States, while part of Death Valley in California is 282 feet (89 meters) below sea level. The eastern coast of the United States is a long, gently rolling lowland area known as the coastal plains. These coastal plains, which stretch from Maine to Texas, are very flat (nowhere in Florida is more than 350 feet above sea level, for example) and often swampy. In general the soil is very poor, except in the fertile southern part, where the plain reaches many miles inland (the Cotton Belt of the Old South and the citrus country of central Florida). At the western edge of the Atlantic coastal plain, there is a chain of low, almost unbroken mountains, stretching from the northern part of Maine southwest into Alabama, called the Appalachian Mountains. The mountains contain enormous quantities of easily accessible coal and iron (which helps explain the huge concentration of heavy industry along the lower region of the Great Lakes). The Priedmont hills, to the east of the main peaks, are the most highly productive agricultural land in the country after the Midwest. The heart of the United States is a vast plain, broken by the Superior Upland and Black Hills in the north and the Ozark Plateau in the south, which extends from central Canada southwards to Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains westwards to the Cordillera. These interior plains, which rise gradually like a saucer to higher land on all sides, are divided into two parts: the wetter, eastern portion is called the Central Plains and the western portion the Great Plains, both of which have good soils. To the west of the Great Plains is the Cordillera, which accounts for one-third of the USA. It is a region of tremendous variety, which can be sub-divided into various other regions. On its eastern border the Rocky Mountains, a high, discontinuous chain of mountains stretching from mountainous Alaska down to Mexico, rise sharply from the Great Plains. These rugged mountains contain many important metals such as lead, uranium and gold. The western edge of the Cordillera is characterised by a coastal chain of high mountains, among which there are broad, fertile valleys. The most important ranges are the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades in the eastern part and the Coastal Ranges along the western coast. There is no Pacific coastal plain and between these two sets of mountains there is a large plateau region, with steep cliffs and canyons, basins and isolated ranges. Many basins are rich in resources such as oil and natural gas. Hawaii is a chain of twenty islands, only seven of which are inhabited. The mountainous islands were formed by volcanic activity and there are still a number of active volcanoes. The United States has several immensely long rivers. There are a large number of rivers in the eastern part of nation, the longest of which is the Missouri (3,942 km), a tributary of the Mississippi (3,760 km); the Mississippi-Missouri-Red Rock system extends for 6,176 km before entering the Gulf of Mexico near New Orleans. Two other tributaries of the Mississippi – the Ohio and Tennessee – are more than 1,250 km long. In the West the Rio Grande, which forms part of the United States-Mexico border, flows for 3,016 km and only the Colorado (2,320 km), Columbia (2,240 km) and the San Joaquim-Sacramento river systems reach the Pacific. Population With more than 245,000,000 inhabitants the United States is the fourth country in the world in terms of population. About 75% of the population live in urban areas and there are 170 cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants, 24 of which have population of over 500,000. Most of these urban centers lie along the Atlantic and Pacific coast, the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. The most populous area is the relatively small Northeast, which accounts for nearly one fourth of the nation’s population. The vast majority of the population was WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) until about 1860. Between 1860 and 1920 almost 30 million immigrants arrived from central and southeastern Europe in particular. These mainly Italian, Russian, Polish and Hungarian immigrants quickly formed their own culturally homogeneous neighbourhoods (“Little Italys”, etc) and became a second economic class behind the WASPs. The almost 12% of the population that are black are bottom of the economic and educational table, with far higher unemployment than whites, especially as a result of racial discrimination. The most rapidly growing ethnic group is the Hispanics (almost 7% of Americans), who still continue to use Spanish in their homes even though the vast majority were born in the United States. Like the blacks, they have a generally lower economic and educational level than the rest of the population. There are also almost 2 million generally prosperous Oriental Americans (predominantly from Japan, China and the Philippines), who are concentrated mainly in California. The 1.5 million Native Americans live mainly in reserves in the southwestern states in usually deep poverty and there has been little or no integration into American society. National Production The United States is the world’s greatest economic power in term of both Gross National Product and per capita GNP, with its export accounting for more than 10% of all world trade. Although the importance of industrial production is falling and that of services growing (as in most of Western Europe), the US remains the world’s greatest maker of industrial goods and around 20 million Americans are still employed in manufacturing. The industrial heart of the nation is the Midwest around the Great Lakes, especially in the region stretching from southern Michigan through northern Ohio and into the Pittsburgh area of Pennsylvania. Another important industrial region is the Northeast, which is the home of the major computer manufacturers. Service industries are also very important in this region and New York is the country’s banking and insurance capital. The nation’s fastest growing region, however, is the Southeast, where the chemical industry and high-technology industries are now catching up with the traditional textile industry as many firms exploit the warm climate and low labour costs. 47% of the land area of the US is farmland, of which 152 million hectares are harvested cropland and 560 million hectares are permanent pasture land, yet only 6.2 million people live on the nation’s 2,300,000 farms. The Midwest is the most important agricultural region in the United States (though California is the number one state in terms of the value of its agricultural products ) and alone produces almost twice as much as the American people can consume; corn and wheat are the main crops, and livestock and dairy farming are also carried out on a large scale. Although the South is still important for traditional crops, such as tobacco, corn and cotton, there is now far greater variety, while Texas is the nation’s leading producer of cattle, sheep, cotton and rice. The West is important for cattle and wheat farming in the Great Plains area, and for fruit in the fertile valleys of the states that border the Pacific. Yet agriculture (together with fishing) accounts for less than 3% of GNP. The ConstitutionThe American Constitution is based on the doctrine of the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary. The respective government institutions – The Presidency, Congress and the Courts – were given limited and specific powers; and a series of checks and balances, whereby each branch of government has certain authority over the others, were also included to make sure these powers were not abused. Government power was further limited by means of a dual system of government, in which the federal government was only given the powers and responsibilities to deal with problems facing the nation as a whole (foreign affairs, trade, control of the army and navy, etc.). The remaining responsibilities and duties of government were reserved to the individual state governments. Article V allowed for amendments to be made to the Constitution (once passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and then ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states). The Constitution finally ratified by all thirteen states in 1791 already contained ten amendments, collectively known as the Bill of Rights (the freedom of religion, speech and the press, etc.), to protect the citizens against possible tyranny by the federal government. So far only twenty-seven amendments have been made to the Constitution. The PresidencyThe President (any natural-born citizen over 34) is elected for a term of four years and can be re-elected for one more term (22nd amendment – adopted after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four successive terms). The President was originally intended to be little more than a ceremonial Head of State, as well as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, but the federal government’s increasing involvement in the nation’s economic life and its prominent role in international affairs, where secrecy and speed are often essential, has increased the importance of the Presidency over Congress. The President now proposes a full legislative program to Congress, although the President, the Cabinet and staff are not, and cannot be, members of Congress. This means that the various bills must be introduced into the House of Representatives or Senate by their members. The President is consequently completely powerless when faced by an uncooperative Congress. Given also the difficulties in ensuring that the laws passed are effectively implemented by the federal bureaucracy, it has been said that the President’s only real power is the power to persuade. The role of the Vice-President is not very well defined by the Constitution, which gives him or her no other task than presiding over the debates in the Senate, where he may only vote in the case of a tie. Yet the Vice President takes over from the President in the case of death, resignation, or sickness, which has already happened on eight occasions. To try and attract able men to this otherwise unimportant, mainly ceremonial post, Vice-President has recently been given more important tasks, especially in foreign affairs. CongressThe legislative branch of national government consists of two houses – the Senate and the House of Representatives – each with a different role, different power and a different electoral procedure. The House of Representatives is the dynamic institution of the federal government. The states are represented on a population basis and are divided into congressional districts or constituencies of roughly equal size (around 520,000 people). There are currently 435 members, who are elected every two years. All states must by law adopt the system of single-member constituencies with a simple majority vote. Vacancies arising from death, resignation, etc, are filled by by-elections. The chairman of the House of Representatives, the Speaker, is elected by the House and has important responsibilities, giving him considerable influence over the President. Moreover, should the President and Vice-President die before the end of their terms, it is the Speaker who becomes President. The Senate is the conservative counterweight to the more populist House of Representatives. Each state has two senators who, since 1913 (17th Amendment), have been chosen directly by the electorate in the way decided by the state legislature in each state. Senators are elected every six years, but the elections are staggered so that one-third of the Senate is elected every two years. A vacancy caused by death or resignation is filled until the next congressional elections by the nomination of the State Governor. There are currently 100 senators. The Senate has the special privilege of unlimited debate to safeguard the rights of minorities, but this can enable a small group of Senators to prevent the passage of a bill (filibustering). Although Congress can legislate its most important task has become that of scrutinizing the policies and actions of the executive, and upholding the interests of states and districts. Indeed, since Representatives and Senators depend on the voters in their various states or constituencies for re-election, they tend to satisfy the particular interests of constituencies and special groups rather than tackle the problems of the nation as a whole. Congress also controls the nation’s finances and its permanent specialist staff helps Congress consider and change the budget presented each year by the President. Political PartiesPolitical parties or “fractions” were not mentioned in the original Constitution. Differences over the role of the federal government led to the first national parties – the Federalists and the Republicans. Since then two major parties dominated political life. The Democratic Party has existed in one form or another since the beginning of the 1800s and has been opposed in successive eras by the Federalist, Whig and Republican parties. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 and was originally the anti-slavery party. There is very little ideological difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, as both parties defend the free-enterprise capitalist system, accepted by almost all Americans as the basis of American society. The Democrats, unlike the Republicans, tend to favour some Government intervention, but both parties have liberal and conservative wings, and in Congress the liberal and conservative wings of the two parties often side with each other against the other wing. It is broadly possible to say that poor people vote for the Democrats and wealthy people for the Republicans. American politics and a party will always alter its platform to try and catch the mood of the nation, the middle ground. The Federal Judiciary In the federal system there are 90 District Courts presided over by a district judge, which hear criminal cases involving breaches of federal law and civil cases on federal matters (disputes between states, non-payment of federal taxes, etc.). Appeals can be made to the United States Court of Appeals, where an appeal is heard by three judges, although in very important cases all nine appeal judges sit together. In vast majority of cases this court’s decision is final and sets a precedent for future cases, although this precedent is not always binding on the Supreme Court. Although not explicitly given the power of judicial review – the power to decide whether the actions of the President, Congress or state government violate the Constitution – this is the important role that the Supreme Court has developed in the legal system. The Supreme Court judges, of whom there are normally nine (though Congress may alter this number) are nominated for life by the President after being approved by the Senate. The judicial systems of the states vary greatly in structure and procedures. Generally speaking, however, at the lowest level there are Justices of the Peace Courts, presided over by elected lay magistrates, which deal with minor offences. Then come the County Courts, which deal with the majority of civil and criminal cases. Appeals go to the District Court of Appeals, while the State Supreme Court has the same role as the United States Supreme Court in the federal system. The most controversial aspect of state judiciaries is that in more than two-thirds of the states judges (including those in the Supreme Court) are elected. Irregular VerbsНеправильные глаголы
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