Legalism : anthropology and history

366 Pages·2012·2.57 MB·English

by  Paul Dresch

LEGALISM
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Legalism
Anthropology and History
Edited by
PAUL DRESCH AND HANNAH SKODA
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX(cid:874) (cid:878)DP
United Kingdom
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Very great thanks are owed to St John’s College, Oxford, whose Research
Centre paid for the beginnings of this project and supported the series
of weekly seminars in Oxford that grew from this in the course of two
years. Fernanda Pirie of St Cross College then secured funds from the
Foundation for Law, Justice, and Society to allow a two-day workshop at
St John’s in June (cid:874)(cid:872)(cid:873)(cid:873), where drafts of the present chapters of this volume
were discussed. The support of the Foundation was invaluable and is
gratefully acknowledged. Mary Montgomery is thanked for her excellent
help with the long editorial task of preparing a (cid:976)inal draft.
The project began with cooperation among anthropologists and
medievalists (Paul Dresch, Patrick Lantschner, Fernanda Pirie, Judith
Scheele, Hannah Skoda, Malcolm Vale), assisted at that point by a lone
classicist (Georgy Kantor). All of us are very grateful indeed to the
historians, classicists, orientalists, and students of law who joined us later
and who made the weekly legalism seminar such fun. We have elected to
keep the focus of the volume, though not that of all the chapters, roughly
where it was. The medieval European world (a ‘game of two halves’ in
any but recent literature) raises questions that highlight the concerns of
our authors generally. As Paul Hyams once remarked, ‘its unique cultural
position, en route to the modern West but still very diff erent from it,
off ers insights into the diff erences between Western values and those
of present-day non-Western cultures that too often serve as the various
“Others” of our world.’
The editors would particularly like to thank Judith Scheele of All
Souls, not only for the eff ort she gave to organizing the later seminars
(without her, the series might well have collapsed), but for her generosity
in providing so many ideas so freely and sharing the fruits of her wide
reading. The intention is that two further volumes will follow: one on
community and justice, and the other on categories and rules.
P.D. H.S.
March (cid:874)(cid:872)(cid:873)(cid:874)
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Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction
Legalism, Anthropology, and History:
a View from Part of Anthropology 1
Paul Dresch
A Historian’s Perspective on the Present Volume 39
Hannah Skoda
1. Ideas of Law in Hellenistic and Roman Legal Practice 55
Georgy Kantor
2. C entres of Law: Duties, Rights, and Jurisdictional
Pluralism in Medieval India 85
Donald R. Davis Jr.
3. The Evolution of Sanctuary in Medieval England 115
T.B. Lambert
4. A spects of Non-State Law: Early Yemen and
Perpetual Peace 145
Paul Dresch
5. T he English Medieval Common Law (to c. 1307) as a
System of National Institutions and Legal Rules:
Creation and Functioning 173
Paul Brand
6. R ightful Measures: Irrigation, Land, and the Sharīʿah
in the Algerian Touat 197
Judith Scheele
7. Lord Kyaw Thu’s Precedent: a Sixteenth-Century
Burmese Law Report 229
Andrew Huxley
viii Contents
8. C ustom, Combat, and the Comparative Study of Laws:
Montesquieu Revisited 261
Malcolm Vale
9. Legal Performances in Late Medieval France 279
Hannah Skoda
References Cited (cid:875)(cid:872)(cid:879)
Index (cid:875)(cid:876)(cid:881)
List of Figures
6.1 The Greater Touat (Algeria) 203
7.1 Part of the Toungoo Empire 233
7.2 Kyaw Thu’s ten (cid:976)indings 248
7.3 Bacon’s speech for the Post-nati 257