The foundations of law: legalism in the ancient world, Europe and Asia
Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th June 2011
St. John's College
When and how does law emerge? What distinguishes it from custom of the commands of the ruler? When do people appeal to explicit rules and generalizing categories and why do they employ such terms to debate the disagreements of ordinary life? Asking such questions about the earliest legal traditions, including those of Rome, India and England, and comparing them with examples from Burma, medieval France, contemporary Yemen and North Africa, the speakers discussed the ways in which these different legal systems embody fundamentally different notions of justice and assumptions about persons, property and community, and gave authority, variously, to lawyers, jurists, bureaucrats and religious leaders to define the ambit of legal rules.
A stimulating keynote paper by classicist and legal scholar Bruce Frier asked What Good did Roman Law do the Romans? while participants from history, anthropology, classics, law and religion were brought together in this project, jointly sponsored by the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society and St John’s College .
Participants included:
Georgy Kantor (Oxford) Ideas of Law in Hellenistic and Roman legal practice
Donald R. Davis (Wisconsin) Centres of Law: duties, rights, and pluralism in medieval India
Paul Dresch (Oxford) Aspects of Non-State Law: early Yemen and perpetual peace.
Thomas Lambert (Oxford) The Evolution of Sanctuary in Medieval England
Judith Scheele (Oxford) Rightful Measures: irrigation, land, and the sharî`ah in the Algerian Touat
Paul Brand (Oxford) The English Medieval Common Law: aspirations of experts and expectations of litigants
Andrew Huxley (SOAS) Guns, Rhetoric, and Buddhism: a sixteenth-century Burmese law report
Sarah Womack (Oxford) An Obsessive ‘Law of Things’ in French Cambodia
Malcolm Vale (Oxford) Custom, Combat, and the Comparative Study of Laws: Montesquieu revisited
Hannah Skoda (Oxford) Legal Performances in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century France
Organisers: Paul Dresch (ISCA), Fernanda Pirie (CSLS), Judith Scheele (All Souls), Malcolm Vale (St John’s)
Workshop Programme Workshop Abstracts
