When I was browsing the legal weblog Law and the Multiverse – Superheroes, supervillains, and the law recently, I was thinking about the presumption of death, usually after seven years (see entry I’m not dead yet).

I discovered that the German statute governing this is the Verschollenheitsgesetz, passed in July 1939. Whether this was because of the approaching Second World War, I don’t know.

The Straight Dope has an entry on the legal problems when someone declared dead comes back.

The law calls people who disappear “absent” or “missing.” Professor Jeanne Carriere prefers a more dramatic term: “the living dead.” In her article, “The Rights of the Living Dead: Absent Persons in Civil Law,” published in the Louisiana Law Review, she says

The number of these “living dead” in the United States has been estimated at between 60,000 and 100,000. They create a morass of legal problems. Questions may arise concerning the security of transactions with the missing person’s estate, such as the disposition of his land, the right to proceeds of insurance policies on his life and pensions, the right to a cause of action, the necessity of providing for his dependents, the marital status of his spouse, the paternity and legitimacy of children of his spouse’s second marriage, the conservation of his property from possible waste, the devolution of succession rights that would pass to him, the release of property from a life tenancy, the requirement of his consent to certain transactions, the merchantability of land titles from his estate, and claims of inheritance from him.

Unfortunately, the article by Professor Jeanne Carriere isn’t available online for less than $29.

One famous case (1985) is that of John Burney, who escaped from financial problems and was declared dead, but then turned up again. His wife (he had a new ‘wife’ too) didn’t have to repay the insurance money, but he did.

Steve Fossett was declared dead after less than a year. Seven years is the usual period.

Amelia Earhart was declared dead eighteen months after her plane was lost over the Pacific. And lo and behold, an article in the Guardian yesterday, Finger may point to solution in Amelia Earhart disappearance riddle.

Some bones of a woman have been found on an atoll and the DNA is to be tested.

But now an array of artefacts from the 1930s and bones found on the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, endured lingering deaths as castaways on a desert island and were eventually eaten by crabs.

There are items supporting the story:

… the other discoveries lend credence to the theory that Earhart died on the atoll after going missing en route to Howland Island in July 1937 at the age of 41 – she was declared legally dead 18 months later.

They include part of a mirror from a woman’s compact, a zip from a Pennsylvania factory and travel-sized bottles made in New Jersey as well as a pocket knife listed on her aircraft’s inventory, all manufactured in the 1930s.

Alongside the goods are the remains of small fires with bird and fish bones, and empty oyster shells laid out in a row as if to collect water, suggesting someone was trying to survive on the island.

Boing Boing shows some artists’ drawings of Julian Assange today and comments on how odd they are.

Another commenter beat me to it: British courtroom artists are not allowed to draw when they are in the courtroom – they have to do it by memory afterwards. The commenter links to Courtroom Sketches on Wikipedia.

Courtroom artists in Germany are allowed to sketch in court, I believe.

This entry and comments have been removed by MM on 5 July 2012. The magazine no longer exists.

Of course I have no memory of this. I went to a kind of school and learnt to read when I was four, but all I can remember is the height of the steps I had to climb up to get to my seat – we were on a little platform, and I think the top of the three steps was level with my head. And my mother didn’t keep my books and toys either.

The earliest book I can remember getting as a birthday or Christmas present and reading a lot of, though, is quite interesting: an American poetry anthology for children which appeared in 1957 and I got it then, so I was ten. And I found it is still published today. It had a wonderfully wide selection of poems and was on beautiful thick paper – a luxury in those days – and had modern printing.

Here it is at amazon.com, and you can look inside and see all the contents:
Favorite Poems Old and New: Selected For Boys and Girls [Hardcover]
Helen Ferris Tibbets (Author), Leonard Weisgard (Illustrator)

I still have the book, but in England. I don’t remember a dustjacket, and I don’t remember illustrations, but maybe there were.

And there was another anthology, which cannot have been this one, which contained an English version of a Hölderlin poem: Life Half Lived. I will have to look at my bookshelves again in Upminster to see if that is there too.

Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King, reminds me of Florence Cathedral. However, this isn’t very surprising, is it? I read most of the book and skimmed the rest when I was translating some guides from German to English and trying to work out the construction. I would be hard put to it to describe the construction now.

Via someone who arrived at Transblawg, I found a link to a reader’s letter on the Telegraph, from Sir Cyril Taylor, who apparently played a role in Tony Blair’s creation of schools called academies.

I am still trying to work out what this letter means. It seems to refer to the fact that the UK introduced a minimum wage for apprentices in October 2010, and this reduced the number of apprenticeships available. Germany doesn’t have a minimum wage. I find it hard to decide whether a minimum wage is a good thing – probably – Wikipedia gives arguments on both sides – but I wonder what it can be like to be so certain of what is right as many Telegraph letters (the column on the right currently links to an article by Boris Johnson headed Snooty Europhiles should be forced to crawl in penance. – Europhile here refers to the euro currency, not the EU, although reading the article raises doubts).

But back to Sir Cyril. He praises Germany.

Because we have a common law legal structure, our law evolves to incorporate EU rules and these are rigorously enforced by our officials.
The result, for example, is that the absurd health and safety rules on young apprentices introduced by the EU have been allowed to reduce dramatically the number of apprenticeships, especially in small firms.
By contrast, in mainland Europe, which follows a Roman law structure, under which the central government makes the decision on whether rules should be enforced, such EU rules are frequently ignored.

Now there is quite a lot of case law in Germany – I’ve banged on about this before – not least by the Bundesverfassungsgericht – the Federal Constitutional Court – which can correct the government’s legislation. It is true that recently Frau Merkel has said that the Court might find it unconstitutional for Germany to bail out other countries, but it doesn’t always work the same way.

However, Sir Cyril has considered the Federal Constitutional Court:

In Germany there is a constitutional court which allows the 16 German Länder to opt out of European rules of which they do not approve.

Ah. I haven’t yet pinned down what decision this relates to, but I feel that the case is somewhat overstated.

He next turns to the Realschule, which he says offers a first-rate training for future German engineers, including providing apprenticeships. This can’t be quite right, can it? Realschule is closest to the rarer UK secondary technical school, and is part of secondary education. The colleges that do apprenticeship training are the Berufsschulen.

Sir Cyril was educated in the UK and USA, and has many honorary degrees too.