1,721,034 research outputs found
Thinking through legal pluralism: ‘forum shopping’ in the later Roman Empire
No full textBook synopsis: Law and Empire provides a comparative view of legal practices in Asia and Europe, from Antiquity to the eighteenth century. It relates the main principles of legal thinking in Chinese, Islamic, and European contexts to practices of lawmaking and adjudication. In particular, it shows how legal procedure and legal thinking could be used in strikingly different ways. Rulers could use law effectively as an instrument of domination; legal specialists built their identity, livelihood and social status on their knowledge of law; and non-elites exploited the range of legal fora available to them. This volume shows the relevance of legal pluralism and the social relevance of litigation for premodern power structures
Legal procedure
No full textThis chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases
Law and religion
No full textIn most ancient cultures, what we now call religion was interwoven throughout all aspects of life and did not always form a discrete cultural domain. Nevertheless, its principal symbols and traditions can be sufficiently distinguished to allow for a fruitful examination of the relationship of law and religion in antiquity. This chapter pursues that endeavour, with particular attention to instances when the sources at our disposal indicate, explicitly or implicitly, that law was relying on religious ideas to achieve legal ends. The chapter considers the role of religion in legitimizing law, in public law and governance, in legal transactions and proceedings, and in the determination and punishment of wrongdoing. It ultimately seeks to add clarity and specificity to the scholarly description of how law and religion interacted in the ancient world
Status and family
No full textThis chapter surveys forms of status by which legal systems assign rights, obligations and capacities to various categories of person. Though such discussions have tended to restrict themselves to statuses recognized in Roman law (the hierarchical birth-based statuses that Maine contrasted with the contractualism of later Western systems), cross-cultural comparison requires a wider lens. Hence, the chapter covers status within the polity, official or military status, unfree or servile status, putatively ‘natural’ statuses, status in the family and status as member of a voluntary or professional association. Special attention is given to the mechanisms involved in change of status, and to status as a factor in legal penalties. It is proposed that, in systems of religious law (which often operate parallel to civil law in a legal-pluralist context and across borders), status within the ‘ecclesial’ polity is comparable to civil status (citizen, resident alien, etc.) within a territorially defined polity
Conclusion
Get PDFChapter 12 concludes the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law by drawing out a set of fundamental comparisons, both differences and similarities, from the volume’s previous chapters, in addition to offering further reflections on the field of ‘ancient law’ itself. The chapter opens by comparing and contrasting the Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law to earlier historiography, underscoring its unique contribution to existing scholarship: developed through collaborative work and drawing upon numerous specialist traditions and technical expertise, across a pan-Eurasian research field. The chapter then moves on to a broader discussion of ‘Mapping the Ancient Legal Cosmos’ and ‘Ordering Ancient Associations’, pinpointing the specific connections between ethics, law and statecraft that can be observed across the ancient source material. The chapter concludes by suggesting several answers to a provocative, but fundamental, question: “What is ‘Ancient’ about ‘Ancient Law’?”
Legal science
No full textAny comparative description of a social and cultural phenomenon, such as ‘law’ and its practice, requires a definition in order to identify the parallel elements in different traditions and societies which are to be compared. This is especially the case if we define ‘legal science’ in its strictest sense: the study of the content of legal norms and of their systematic order. In this chapter, an effort has been made to characterise ‘legal science’, as far as possible, from the internal point of view of several traditions and societies (Chinese, Indian, Roman, Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Jewish). In this perspective, we will refer to both the set of activities carried out by ‘legal experts’, in the whole domain of law (legislation, adjudication, legal counselling and education), and the legal experts themselves, as far as they were regarded as such by their own societie
Encyclopedia of political theory
No full textBook synopsis: In discussing a topic, political science lecturers and course textbooks often toss out the name of a theorist or make a sideways reference to a particular theory and move on, as if assuming their student audience possesses the necessary background to appreciate and integrate the reference. However, academic librarians can tell you this is usually far from the case. Students often approach them seeking a source to provide a quick overview of a particular theory or theorist with just the basics: the who, what, where, how, and why. And librarians often find it difficult to guide these students to a quick, one-stop source.
SAGE Reference presents the three-volume Encyclopedia of Political Theory, available in both print and electronic formats.
This work serves as a reference source for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary political theory. Drawing together a team of international scholars, it examines the global landscape of all the key theories and the theorists behind them, presenting them in the context needed to understand their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to interpretations of long-established theories, it also offers essays on cutting-edge research as one might find in a handbook. And, like an unabridged dictionary, it provides concise, to-the-point definitions of key concepts, ideas, schools, and figures
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