The founding of the Roman Principate was a time of great turmoil. This book brings together a set of important Latin inscriptions, including the recently discovered documents concerning the death of Germanicus and trial of Cn. Piso, in order to illustrate the developing sense of dynasty that underpinned the new monarchy of Augustus. Each inscription is supplied with its original text, a new English translation, and a full introduction and historical commentary that will be useful to students and scholars alike. The book also provides important technical help in understanding the production and interpretation of documents and inscriptions, thereby making it an excellent starting point for introducing students to Roman epigraphy.

The founding of the Roman Principate was a time of great turmoil. This book brings together a set of important Latin inscriptions, including the recently discovered documents concerning the death of Germanicus and trial of Cn. Piso, in order to illustrate the developing sense of dynasty that underpinned the new monarchy of Augustus. Each inscription is supplied with its original text, a new English translation, and a full introduction and historical commentary that will be useful to students and scholars alike. The book also provides important technical help in understanding the production and interpretation of documents and inscriptions, thereby making it an excellent starting point for introducing students to Roman epigraphy.

The common law world (the Commonwealth and United States) operates through statutes applied under a uniform system, the essence of which is uniquely described in this book. Francis Bennion, the renowned Oxford don and legislative draftsman, here distills forty years of prolific writings on statute law and statutory interpretation.

Tribal Criminal Law and Procedure examines complex Indian nations' tribal justice systems, analyzing tribal statutory law, tribal case law, and the cultural values of Native peoples. Using tribal court opinions and tribal codes, it reveals how tribal governments use a combination of oral and written law to dispense justice and strengthen their nations and people. Carrie E. Garrow and Sarah Deer discuss the histories, structures, and practices of tribal justice systems, comparisons of traditional tribal justice with American law and jurisdictions, elements of criminal law and procedure, and alternative sentencing and traditional sanctions. New features of the second edition include new chapters on: * The Tribal Law and Order Act's Enhanced Sentencing Provisions * The Violence Against Women Act's Special Domestic Violence Criminal Jurisdiction * Tribal-State Collaboration Tribal Criminal Law and Procedure is an invaluable resource for legal scholars and students. The book is published in cooperation with the Tribal Law and Policy Institute (visit them at www.tlpi.org).

Challenging the usual introductions to the study of law, A Critical Introduction to Law argues that law is inherently political and reflects the interests of the few even while presenting itself as neutral. This fully revised and updated fourth edition provides contemporary examples to demonstrate the relevance of these arguments in the twenty-first century. The book includes an analysis of the common sense of law; the use of anthropological examples to gain external perspectives of our use and understanding of law; a consideration of central legal concepts, such as order, rules, property, dispute resolution, legitimation and the rule of law; an examination of the role of law in women's subordination and finally a critique of the effect of our understanding of law upon the wider world. Clearly written and admirably suited to provoking discussions on the role of law in our contemporary world, this book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students reading law, and will be of interest to those studying legal systems and skills courses, jurisprudence courses, and law and society.

First published in 1939, this book is the second edition of a 1925 original. Aimed at beginners, it sets forth the main principles of Roman Law from both classical and later times, avoiding discussion of the problems involved in a more advanced study of the subject. Chapters are divided into three broad areas, concerning laws relating to persons, things and actions. An additional discussion of the sources and arrangement of laws is also provided. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Roman law and legal history.

The use of writing in the development of Greek law was unique. In this comparative 2008 study Professor Gagarin shows the reader how Greek law developed and explains why it became so different from the legal systems with which most legal historians are familiar. While other early communities wrote codes of law for academic or propaganda purposes, the Greeks used writing extensively to make their laws available to a relatively large segment of the community. On the other hand, the Greeks made little use of writing in litigation whereas other cultures used it extensively in this area, often putting written documents at the heart of the judicial process. Greek law thereby avoided becoming excessively technical and never saw the development of a specialised legal profession. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in the history of law, as well as ancient historians.

This 1931 book was written to replace The Elementary Principles of Roman Law, but it is not a second edition of that book. It is more systematic in plan: it aims at giving a central view of the different institutions of the Private Law and of the notions which underlie them. But its purpose is the same: its is for the use of students who have read the Institutes and little more, and it is intended to stimulate rather than to inform. It will still be of interest today.

This new edition of The Social Organization of Law uses the five-part organization of the First Edition--social stratification, social morphology, culture, organization, and other social control--in presenting a brand new set of readings. These readings represent the great variety of work done in the sociology of law, a field dedicated to the study of the influence of social factors on legal behavior pioneered by Donald Black. Some of the readings look at the operation of the justice systems others at various stages of the legal process. Only two had appeared in print when the First Edition of The Sociology of Law was published, and neither was included in it. This Second Edition, published 25 years after the First, thus testifies to the recently created wealth of ideas while introducing a new generation to the concepts that have already proved so fruitful.
Key Features
* Presents all new essays while retaining the organizational structure of the First Edition
* Illustrates new advances in jurisprudential, moral, and practical applications of legal sociology
* Covers the contemporary U.S. as well as other countries and historical periods
* Embraces a wide variety of research methods and strategies

This book is the first comprehensive study of the meaning and measure of enforceability. While we have long debated what restraints should govern the conduct of our social life, we have paid relatively little attention to the question of what it means to make a restraint enforceable. Focusing on the enforceability of legal rights but also addressing the enforceability of moral rights and social conventions, Mark Reiff explains how we use punishment and compensation to make restraints operative in the world. After describing the various means by which restraints may be enforced, Reiff explains how the sufficiency of enforcement can be measured, and he presents a unified theory of deterrence, retribution, and compensation that shows how these aspects of enforceability are interconnected. Reiff then applies his theory of enforceability to illuminate a variety of real-world problem situations.

Capitalism has outperformed all other systems and maintained a positive growth rate since it began. Svetozar Pejovich makes the case within this book that a major reason for the success of capitalism lies in the efficiency-friendly incentives of its basic institutions, which continuously adjust the rules of the game to the requirements of economic progress. The analysis throughout is consistent and is supported by evidence. Key components of the proposed theory are the rule of law, the market for institutions, the interaction thesis, the carriers of change, and the process of changing formal and informal institutions. This book will be of great interest to academics and students of law and economics, new institutional economics, comparative systems and public choice throughout the world and especially in East Asia and South America where institutional issues are being debated.

The Moral Limits of Law analyses the related debates concerning the moral obligation to obey the law, conscientious citizenship, and state legitimacy. Modern societies are drawn in a tension between the centripetal pull of the local and the centrifugal stress of the global. Boundaries that once appeared permanent are now permeable: transnational legal, economic, and trade institutions increasingly erode the autonomy of states. Nonetheless transnational principles are still typically effected through state law. For law's subjects, this tension brings into focus the interaction of legal and moral obligations and the legitimacy of state authority. This volume incorporates a comprehensive critical analysis of the methodology and substance of the debates in recent legal, political, and moral philosophy, regarding political obligation and the moral obligation to obey the law. The author argues that traditional accounts of political obligation that assume a bounded conception of the polity are no longer tenable. Higgins therefore presents an original theory of the conscientious agent's attitude towards law that accommodates the contemporary social tension between local and global obligations.

"Starkly essentialist reasoning sounds almost quaint by today's standards of gender equality. So it is with some surprise that general readers will encounter an intense and carefully reasoned defense of essentialism from the pen of one of America's best-known feminist legal theorists."
--"Women's Review of Books"

"By critiquing traditional ideas about 'justice, ' including economic theories about value, this provocative feminist jurisprudential scholar advances what she calls an 'ethic of care' and argues that 'if adjudication is to be just, then the goal of good judging must be both justice and care.'"
--"Georgia Bar Journal"

Over the past decade, mainstream feminist theory has repeatedly and urgently cautioned against arguments which assert the existence of fundamental--or essential--differences between men and women. Any biological or natural differences between the sexes are often flatly denied, on the grounds that such an acknowledgment will impede women's claims to equal treatment.

In "Caring for Justice," Robin West turns her sensitive, measured eye to the consequences of this widespread refusal to consider how women's lived experiences and perspectives may differ from those of men. Her work calls attention to two critical areas in which an inadequate recognition of women's distinctive experiences has failed jurisprudence. We are in desperate need, she contends, both of a theory of justice which incorporates women's distinctive moral voice on the meaning of justice into our discourse, and of a theory of harm which better acknowledges, compensates, and seeks to prevent the various harms which women, disproportionately and distinctively, suffer.

Providing afresh feminist perspective on traditional jurisprudence, West examines such issues as the nature of justice, the concept of harm, economic theories of value, and the utility of constitutional discourse. She illuminates the adverse repercussions of the anti-essentialist position for jurisprudence, and offers strategies for correcting them. Far from espousing a return to essentialism, West argues an anti- anti-essentialism, which greatly refines our understanding of the similarities and differences between women and men.

Asserting that litigation in late imperial China was a form of documentary warfare, this book offers a social analysis of the men who composed legal documents for commoners and elites alike. Litigation masters--a broad category of legal facilitators ranging from professional plaintmasters to simple but literate men to whom people turned for assistance--emerge in this study as central players in many of the most scandalous cases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. These cases reveal the power of scandal to shape entire categories of law in the popular and official imaginations.
The author characterizes litigation masters as entrepreneurs of power, intermediaries who typically emerge in the process of limited state expansion to provide links between local interests and the infrastructure of the state. These powermongers routinely acted in the interests of the local elite and the male lineage. But cases preserved in criminal archives also reveal a clientele surprisingly composed of the subordinate actors in legal disputes--widows fighting in-laws and other men, debtors contesting creditors, younger brothers disputing older ones, and common people charging the rich. Challenging earlier scholarship claiming that the Chinese legal system simply maintained the hegemony of elites and the patriarchal order, this study shows how the legal tools of domination were often transformed into weapons of social resistance and revenge.
The book also examines the manifold ways in which legal practice, Confucian ideology, and popular entertainments like opera and storytelling coalesced into Chinese legal culture. Popular traditions in particular did not simply reflect legal culture but actively influenced it, shaping common presumptions about law that transcended differences of class and region. Exploring Chinese legal culture in the structural contexts of commercialization, changes in property transactions, and ineradicable litigation backlogs, the author explains why litigation was condemned by all classes of Chinese men and women even as all classes litigated.

Is it lawful to shed the blood of someone who insults the Prophet Muhammad? Does the Qu'ran stipulate a worldly punishment for apostates? This book tells the gripping story of Rāfiq Taqī, an Azerbaijani journalist and writer, who was condemned to death by an Iranian cleric for a blasphemous news article in 2006. Delving into the Qu'ran and Hadith - the most sacred sources for all Muslims - Mohsen Kadivar explores the subject of blasphemy and apostasy from the perspective of Shi'a jurisprudence to articulate a polarisation between secularism and extremist religious orthodoxy. In a series of online exchanges, he debates the case with Muhammad Jawad Fazel, the son of Grand Ayatollah Fazel Lankarānī who issued the fatwa pronouncing death penalty on Taqī. While disapproving of the journalist's writings, Kadivar takes a defensive stance against vigilante murders and asks whether death for apostasy reflects the true spirit of Islam.

In this book, Andrew Riggsby offers a survey of the main areas of Roman law, both substantive and procedural, and how the legal world interacted with the rest of Roman life. Emphasizing basic concepts, he recounts its historical development and focuses in particular on the later Republic and early centuries of the Roman Empire. The volume is designed as an introductory work, with brief chapters that will be accessible to college students with little knowledge of legal matters or Roman antiquity. The text is also free of technical language and Latin terminology. It can be used in courses on Roman law, Roman history, or comparative law, but it will also serve as a useful reference for more advanced students and scholars.

The delict of iniuria is among the most sophisticated products of the Roman legal tradition. The original focus of the delict was assault, although iniuria-literally a wrong or unlawful act-indicated a very wide potential scope. Yet it quickly grew to include sexual harassment and defamation, and by the first century CE it had been re-oriented around the concept of contumelia so as to incorporate a range of new wrongs, including insult and invasion of privacy. In truth, it now comprised all attacks on personality. It is the Roman delict of iniuria which forms the foundation of both the South African and-more controversially-Scots laws of injuries to personality. On the other hand, iniuria is a concept formally alien to English law. But as its title suggests, this book of essays is representative of a species of legal scholarship best described as 'oxymoronic comparative law', employing a concept peculiar to one legal tradition in order to interrogate another where, apparently, it does not belong. Addressing a series of doctrinal puzzles within the law of assault, defamation and breach of privacy, it considers in what respects the Roman delict of iniuria overlaps with its modern counterparts in England, Scotland and South Africa; the differences and similarities between the analytical frameworks employed in the ancient and modern law; and the degree to which the Roman proto-delict points the way to future developments in each of these three legal systems.

Despite abundant literature on transaction costs, there is little to no in-depth analysis regarding what the transaction is or how it works. Drawing on both Old and New Institutional Economics and on a variety of interdisciplinary sources, this monograph traces the history of the meaning of transaction in institutional economics, mapping its topicality and use over time. This manuscript treats the idea of 'transaction' as a construct with legal, competitive and political dimensions, and connects different approaches within institutional economics. The book covers the contributions of key thinkers from different schools, including (in alphabetical order) Ronald H. Coase, John R. Commons, Robert Lee Hale, Oliver Hart, Mancur Olson, Thorstein Veblen and Olver E. Williamson. This book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of institutional economics, law and economics, and economics, and the history of economic thought.

Law is too often perceived solely as state-based rules and institutions that provide a rational alternative to religious rites and ancestral customs. The Spirit of Hindu Law uses the Hindu legal tradition as a heuristic tool to question this view and reveal the close linkage between law and religion. Emphasizing the household, the family, and everyday relationships as additional social locations of law, it contends that law itself can be understood as a theology of ordinary life. An introduction to traditional Hindu law and jurisprudence, this book is structured around key legal concepts such as the sources of law and authority, the laws of persons and things, procedure, punishment and legal practice. It combines investigation of key themes from Sanskrit legal texts with discussion of Hindu theology and ethics, as well as thorough examination of broader comparative issues in law and religion.

English Legal System in Context takes a unique and highly praised analytical approach to the subject of the English Legal System. Frequent examples are incorporated throughout the text, illustrating the link between theory and practice, while the concise and engaging style enables students to have an excellent understanding of the subject as a whole. A wide range of traditional core areas are covered in the text, such as the courts, case law, legal professionals and civil and criminal proceedings. However, the authors also discuss areas such as the role of private policing and the work of non-police agencies, giving students a balanced overview of the subject area. Additionally, the text provides a wealth of references for students who want to gain a deeper understanding of the legal system. With a clear and logical structure, this perceptive and wide ranging text provides a unique introduction to the English Legal System.

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organising forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretative methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This book seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects.

Due Process is one of the most interesting and conceptually challenging areas of the common law, and in recent years there has been a major revival of interest in the sheer range and applicability of the term. In this major new book, the author of the widely admired Discretionary Powers offers a study of the underlying principles of due process and fair procedures, and sets the discussion within a broad comparative and theoretical framework. In landmark decisions such as Ridge v. Baldwin (1968) the courts in Britain and other parts of the Commonwealth have begun to recognize the importance of procedural fairness across a broad spectrum of official powers and decisions. Principles have begun to emerge, and yet the courts have not yet developed an approach which is entirely adequate to the task. In this timely book, the author traces the development of these principles within a framework which includes analysis and critique of legal developments in the major common law jurisdictions, and which relates these developments to similar ideas under both the European Convention on Human Rights and the American Constitution. Original, scholarly and thought-provoking, this major new study will be required reading for lawyers with interests in public law, civil and criminal procedure, civil liberties, legal theory and comparative law.

Focusing on the Maghrib in the period between 1300 and 1500, in this 2002 book David Powers analyses the application of Islamic law through the role of the mufti. To unravel the sophistication of the law, he considers six cases which took place in the Marinid period on subjects as diverse as paternity, fornication, water rights, family endowments, the slander of the Prophet and disinheritance. The source for these disputes are fatwas issued by the muftis, which the author uses to situate each case in its historical context and to interpret the principles of Islamic law. In so doing he demonstrates that, contrary to popular stereotypes, muftis were in fact dedicated to reasoned argument, and sensitive to the manner in which law, society and culture interacted. The book represents a groundbreaking approach to a complex field. It will be read by students of Islamic law and those interested in traditional Muslim societies.

Civil law and common law systems are held to enforce promises differently: civil law, in principle, will enforce any promise, while common law will enforce only those with 'consideration'. In that respect, modern civil law supposedly differs from the Roman law from which it descended, where a promise was enforced depending on the type of contract the parties had made. This 2001 volume is concerned with the extent to which these characterizations are true, and how these and other differences affect the enforceability of promises. Beginning with a concise history of these distinctions, the volume then considers how twelve European legal systems would deal with fifteen concrete situations. Finally, a comparative section considers why legal systems enforce certain promises and not others, and what promises should be enforced. This is the second completed project of The Common Core of European Private Law launched at the University of Trento.