In English law, the benefit of clergy (Law Latin Privilegium clericale) was originally a provision by which clergymen could claim that they were outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and be tried instead in an ecclesiastical court under canon law. Eventually, the course of history transformed it into a mechanism by which first-time offenders could receive a more lenient sentence for some lesser crimes (the so-called "clergyable" ones).
Read more about Benefit Of Clergy: Origin, The Miserere, Tudor-era Reforms, Later Development
Famous quotes containing the words benefit of, benefit and/or clergy:
“We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much or more for our posterity, for our family. The practice and benefit of marriage concerns our race very far beyond us.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to be content with the wives of others.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)