Legal Traditions, Legal Cultures and Families of Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 131-167
Author(s):  
George Mousourakis
Keyword(s):  
Legal Traditions

Ezekiel and Israel’s Legal Traditions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Lyons
Keyword(s):  
Broad Sense ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Similarities And Differences

This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in form, content, and vocabulary between the book of Ezekiel and the commands, motivations, and sanctions in the Pentateuch. It considers how legal traditions in the broad sense—that is, not just “laws,” but also statements about obligation, benefits, and punishments—are used in the book of Ezekiel. The logic of the book is deeply indebted to priestly ideology and its notions of purity and holiness. This chapter also examines the possibility, nature, and direction of dependence, both conceptual and literary, between the book of Ezekiel and Israel’s legal traditions (Deuteronomic, Priestly, and Holiness) that were textualized and incorporated into what became the Pentateuch.

Maxims

2019 ◽  
pp. 654-669
Author(s):  
Donald R. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Interpretation ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

This chapter examines the history and use of maxims in legal traditions from several areas of the world. A comparison of legal maxims in Roman, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic law shows that maxims function both as a basic tools for legal interpretation and as distillations of substantive legal principles applicable to many cases. Maxims are characterized by their unquestionable character, even though it is often easy to demonstrate contradictions between them. As a result, legal maxims seem linked to the recurrent desire for law to have a moral foundation. Although maxims have lost their purchase in most contemporary jurisprudence and legal practice, categories such as “canons of construction,” “legal principles,” and “super precedents” all show similarities to the brief and limited collections of maxims in older legal traditions. The search for core ideas underlying the law thus continues under different names.

scholarly journals From Norms to Facts: The Realization of Rights in Common and Civil Private Law

2011 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helge Dedek
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Common ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
The Ideal

Every legal system that ties judicial decision making to a body of preconceived norms has to face the tension between the normative formulation of the ideal and its approximation in social reality. In the parlance of the common law, it is, more concretely, the remedy that bridges the gap between the ideal and the real, or, rather, between norms and facts. In the common law world—particularly in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—a lively discourse has developed around the question of how rights relate to remedies. To the civilian legal scholar—used to thinking within a framework that strictly categorizes terms like substance and procedure, subjective right, action, and execution—the concept of remedy remains a mystery. The lack of “remedy” in the vocabulary of the civil law is more than just a matter of attaching different labels to functional equivalents, it is the expression of a different way of thinking about law. Only if a legal system is capable of satisfactorily transposing the abstract discourse of the law into social reality does the legal machinery fulfill its purpose: due to the pivotal importance of this translational process, the way it is cast in legal concepts thus allows for an insight into the deep structure of a legal culture, and, convergence notwithstanding, the remaining epistemological differences between the legal traditions of the West. A mixed jurisdiction must reflect upon these differences in order to understand its own condition and to define its future course.

The Feudal Origins of the Western Legal Tradition

ORDO ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (70) ◽  
pp. 3-20
Author(s):  
Cameron Harwick ◽  
Hilton Root
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Legal Development ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
Legal Traditions

AbstractThis paper draws a distinction between ‘communitarian’ and ‘rationalist’ legal orders on the basis of the implied political strategy. We argue that the West’s solution to the paradox of governance – that a government strong enough to protect rights cannot itself be restrained from violating those rights – originates in certain aspects of the feudal contract, a confluence of aspects of communitarian Germanic law, which enshrined a contractual notion of political authority, and rationalistic Roman law, which supported large-scale political organization. We trace the tradition of strong but limited government to the conflict between factions with an interest in these legal traditions – nobles and the crown, respectively – and draw limited conclusions for legal development in non-Western contexts.

Legal Practice in the Southern Leon and Castile of the 12th Century: a Borderline State

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (9 (107)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Galina Popova
Keyword(s):  
Legal Framework ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Normative Basis ◽  
Judicial Proceedings

The article is devoted to the legal history of the lands of the Kingdom of Toledo in the first two hundred years after the Christian reconquest. The assimilation of the conquered lands by the new political power, preserving the border position, leads to the emergence of a special legal tradition, typical for other similar territories, which received the general name “extremadura” — “borderland”. The Fueros, created in the Kingdom of Toledo, from the very beginning, firmly linked the territorial and personal nature of the legal norms included in their texts. The formation of local legal traditions took place with the active participation of the local elite, which was reflected in the editing of Fuero texts. The inhabitants of Toledo were supposed to use the Visigothic "Liber iudiciorum" as a normative basis for legal proceedings, but at the same time maintained the legitimate possibility of resorting to norms of a different origin, the so-called “Fuero of Castilians”. The lack of a strict systematization in the legal framework of the proceedings was reflected in the organization of judicial officials in Toledo. The good preservation of the local act material allows us to consider in more detail the practical implementation of the legal norm in the process of judicial proceedings, recorded in Arabic in the protocol of the end of the 8th century.

Review of the III International historical and legal congress “Legal traditions of the formation of Russian statehood”

2021 ◽  
pp. 182
Author(s):  
Lyudmila Yu. Grudtsyna
Keyword(s):  
Russian Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
Scientific Schools ◽  
Legal Science ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Further Development

The review of the III International historical and legal congress “Legal traditions of the formation of Russian statehood", dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the proclamation of the Russian Empire, is given. One of the main tasks of the event was to bring together representatives of science from different states, different scientific schools and directions to solve topical historical and legal problems of the state and law. Following the results of the congress, a declaration was adopted, in which the importance of continuing legal research of domestic state-legal traditions was noted, the main directions for the further development of historical and legal science were outlined.

Legal Traditions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Duve
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Time History ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Legal Regimes

Legal anthropology has to understand and deal with complex and often plural constellations of normative bodies, legal discourses, institutions, and practices. They shape the legal regimes people live in. These legal regimes as well as the ways in which societies operate with legal diversity have developed over time. History has done more than shape the vocabulary and the grammar of each community’s law. The narratives we produce about the past are also used to construct and express individual and social identities. Thus, history and its (re)construction by later generations can impose constraints and limit available options, but also open spaces of negotiation and provide for innovation. Legal regimes of the past are often called ‘legal traditions’. In the last decades, the idea of ‘legal traditions’ has gained considerable practical importance. Especially in former colonial countries, and due to the increasing recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in international and national law, many actors are drawing on history to claim rights and obligations for the present and the future. In a similar manner, some historical legal regimes seem to embody injustice, leading to pleas for the recognition of their unjust character or even for material compensation. The aim of this chapter is to offer some reflections on the concept of ‘legal traditions’ and its role in constructing our identities and shaping our present legal regimes.

Environmental Justice and Indigeneity

Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Indigenous Nations ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Intellectual Traditions ◽  
Indigenous Perspectives ◽  
United Nations Declaration

Indigenous environmental justice (IEJ) is distinct from the broader EJ field, which has been found to exhibit certain limitations when applied to Indigenous contexts. Indigenous scholars have observed, for example, that EJ scholarship generally does not consider Indigenous sovereignty, laws, and governance. Attempts to ensure the relevance and applicability of EJ to Indigenous contexts and realities have resulted in what can be thought of as an “Indigenizing” of the EJ scholarship. Recent scholarship thus recognizes that Indigenous peoples occupy a unique position in terms of historical, political, and legal context, and that this requires specific recognition of their goals and aspirations, such as those outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN General Assembly [UNGA] 2007). Achieving IEJ will require more than simply incorporating Indigenous perspectives into existing EJ theoretical and methodological frameworks, as valuable as these are for diagnosing injustice. IEJ offers a theoretical and analytical framework that goes beyond “Indigenizing” and “decolonizing” existing EJ scholarship and extends to frameworks informed by Indigenous intellectual traditions, knowledge systems, and laws. Indigenous nations and societies are diverse and no single IEJ framework will serve all contexts and situations. There are, however, commonalities among suggested frameworks as evidenced through various international environmental declarations prepared by Indigenous peoples over the past three decades that convey key concepts relating to IEJ. First, Indigenous knowledge systems should be utilized as a theoretical framework for analysis. In this frame, justice applies to all “relatives” in Creation, not just people. EJ is not just about rights to a safe environment, but it includes the duties and responsibilities of people to all beings and, conversely, their responsibilities to people. IEJ is regarded as a question of balance and harmony, of reciprocity and respect, among all beings in Creation; not just between humans, but among all “relatives,” as LaDuke 1999 and Kanngieser and Todd 2020 show. Second, Indigenous legal traditions should form the basis for achieving justice. Scholars have noted how Western legal systems continue to fail Indigenous peoples and the environment. In this sense, grounding conceptions of justice and injustice in Indigenous intellectual and legal traditions opens up possibilities for achieving justice. Finally, IEJ must acknowledge the historical and ongoing role colonialism has played in perpetuating injustices.

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