Legalism: Anthropology and History

382 Pages·2012·2.52 MB·English

by  Paul Dresch

LEGALISM
Legalism
Anthropology and History
Edited by
PAUL DRESCH AND HANNAH SKODA
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP
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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 2011,
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 final 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 different from it, offers
insights into the differences 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 effort 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 2012
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction
Legalism, Anthropology, and History: a View from Part of Anthropology
Paul Dresch
A Historian’s Perspective on the Present Volume
Hannah Skoda
1. Ideas of Law in Hellenistic and Roman Legal Practice
Georgy Kantor
2. Centres of Law: Duties, Rights, and Jurisdictional Pluralism in Medieval
India
Donald R. Davis Jr.
3. The Evolution of Sanctuary in Medieval England
T.B. Lambert
4. Aspects of Non-State Law: Early Yemen and Perpetual Peace
Paul Dresch
5. The English Medieval Common Law (to c. 1307) as a System of National
Institutions and Legal Rules: Creation and Functioning
Paul Brand
6. Rightful Measures: Irrigation, Land, and the Sharīʿah in the Algerian Touat
Judith Scheele
7. Lord Kyaw Thu’s Precedent: a Sixteenth-Century Burmese Law Report
Andrew Huxley
8. Custom, Combat, and the Comparative Study of Laws: Montesquieu
Revisited
Malcolm Vale
9. Legal Performances in Late Medieval France
Hannah Skoda
References Cited
Index
List of Figures
6.1 The Greater Touat (Algeria)
7.1 Part of the Toungoo Empire
7.2 Kyaw Thu’s ten findings
7.3 Bacon’s speech for the Post-nati
List of Contributors
Paul Brand is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and
Professor of English Legal History. His publications include The Origins of the
English Legal Profession (1992) and Kings, Barons and Justices: the Making
and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England (2003). He has
edited four volumes of The Earliest English Law Reports and two volumes of
The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.
Donald R. Davis Jr. is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and
Cultures of Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is author of The
Boundaries of Hindu Law: Tradition, Custom and Politics in Medieval Kerala
(2004) and of The Spirit of Hindu Law (2010). He co-edited (with Timothy
Lubin and Jayanth Krishnan) Hinduism and Law: an Introduction (2010).
Paul Dresch is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and University Lecturer
in Social Anthropology. His publications include Tribes, Government, and
History in Yemen (1989), A Modern History of Yemen (2001) and The Rules of
Barat (2006). He has co-edited volumes (with Wendy James) on fieldwork,
(with Pierre Bonte and Edouard Conte) on Islamic politics and kinship, and
(with James Piscatori) on the Arab Gulf.
Andrew Huxley is a barrister and is Professor of Southeast Asian Law at SOAS
(School of Oriental and African Studies, London). He writes on Burmese legal
history, on law and state in contemporary Southeast Asia, and on how the
Buddhist legal tradition compares with others. He edited Thai Law: Buddhist
Law: Essays on the Legal History of Thailand, Laos and Burma (1996) and
Religion, Law and Tradition: Comparative Studies on Religious Law (2002).
Georgy Kantor is currently a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in Classics
at New College, Oxford. He has published several articles, in Russian and in
English, on law in the Roman East. He is an assistant editor of Supplementum
epigraphicum graecum, and is finishing a monograph on Law in Roman Asia
Minor (133 BC-AD 212).
T.B. Lambert is currently Departmental Lecturer in Early Medieval History at
Balliol College, Oxford. He co-edited (with David Rollason), Peace and
Protection in the Middle Ages (2009), and recently published ‘Theft, Homicide