The Laws of Hammurabi

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law

The Laws of Hammurabi is one of the earliest law codes, dating from the eighteenth century BCE Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). It is the culmination of a tradition in which scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a repertoire of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The book describes how the scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles. The scribe inserted the statutes into the structure of a royal inscription, skillfully reshaping the genre. This approach allowed the king to use the law code to demonstrate that Hammurabi had fulfilled the mandate to guarantee justice enjoined upon him by the gods, affirming his authority as king. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia, influencing biblical law and the law of the Hittite Empire and perhaps shaping Greek and Roman law. The Laws of Hammurabi is also a witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became a classic text and the subject of formal commentaries, marking a Copernican revolution in intellectual culture.

scholarly journals FORMALISM IN ROMAN CONTRACT LAW

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 1457-1463
Author(s):  
Shpresa Alimi-Memedi
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Stages ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Stage Of Development ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Accepted Form

The certain mode of production conditions certain legal expressions, determines the character and the forms of expression of the law, and depending on this, certain legal institutes and legal principles arise and change. The principle of formalism in a certain period of development of contractual relations is nothing but an expression of certain socioeconomic and other conditions present in that period. The subject of this paper is the principle of formalism as a feature of Roman contract law, the emergent forms of formalism in Roman law, the causes and functions of formalism in certain stage of development of Roman law. The influence of religion on the law and the low level of development of socioeconomic relations were the main reasons for the recognition of formalism in the first legal systems.The principle of formalism implies that the form of the contract as a means of expressing the consent of the will of the parties is a legally established imperative. The specific way of expressing the will to conclude a contract is an essential element of the contract. Infringement of the form is sanctioned by the nullity of the agreement.Formalism in Roman contract law is present and dominant in the period of the early Roman state and law, the late Roman Republic and pre-classical Roman law. The principle of formalism in these developmental stages of the Roman state and law does not mean that it excludes completely the opposite principle of consensualism which implies that contracts are created by a mere consent of the will of the contracting parties, which can be expressed in words or in writing, or with other behavior from which its existence can certainly be concluded. In Roman law, the consensual form has never succeeded in becoming a generally accepted form and Roman law has never formulated the general principle of consensuality.

Without the Power to Drink or Contract

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-48
Author(s):  
Warren Swain
Keyword(s):  
Alcohol Consumption ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Current Position ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Over Time

Intoxication as a ground to set aside a contract is not something that has proved to be easy for the law to regulate. This is perhaps not very surprising. Intoxication is a temporary condition of varying degrees of magnitude. Its presence does however raise questions of contractual autonomy and individual responsibility. Alcohol consumption is a common social activity and perceptions of intoxication and especially alcoholism have changed over time. Roman law is surprisingly quiet on the subject. In modern times the rules about intoxicated contracting in Scottish and English law is very similar. Rather more interestingly the law in these two jurisdictions has reached the current position in slightly different ways. This history can be traced through English Equity, the works of the Scottish Institutional writers, the rise of the Will Theory, and all leavened with a dose of judicial pragmatism.

scholarly journals PERSONHOOD, ANIMALS, AND THE LAW

Think ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (34) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. Korsgaard
Keyword(s):  
Roman Law ◽  
Ethical Problems ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Law

The idea that all the entities in the world may be, for legal and moral purposes, divided into the two categories of ‘persons’ and ‘things’ comes down to us from the tradition of Roman law. In the law, a ‘person’ is essentially the subject of rights and obligations, while a thing may be owned as property. In ethics, a person is an object of respect, to be valued for her own sake, and never to be used as a mere means to an end, while a thing has only a derivative value, and may be used as a means to some person's ends. This bifurcation is unfortunate because it seems to leave us with no alternative but to categorize everything as either a person or a thing. Yet some of the entities that give rise to the most vexing ethical problems are exactly the ones that do not seem to fit comfortably into either category. For various, different, kinds of reasons, it seems inappropriate to categorize a fetus, a non-human animal, the environment, or an object of great beauty, as a person, but neither does it seem right to say of such things that they are to be valued only as means.

scholarly journals Civilians and insurance: approximations of reality to the law

2015 ◽  
Vol 83 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 323-364
Author(s):  
Guido Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Do So

In the study of the history of insurance, much attention has been paid to early modern jurists. Their importance as a source for the study of the subject is, however, debatable. Early modern jurists were more interested in systematising insurance than in describing it for what it was. Their main effort lay in explaining this non-Roman contract in Roman law terms. To do so, something had to be sacrificed - reality.


scholarly journals BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ROMAN LAW OF LETTING AND HIRING

2006 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Du Plessis
Keyword(s):  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Complete Picture ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Compilation Process ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Law ◽  
Different Parts

JURISTIC writing and Imperial Constitutions on the subject of locatio conductio, collected by the compilers to produce D.19.2 and C.4.65, do not present a complete picture of the Roman law of lease. Not only were most of these texts severed from their original context, but the statements in the Introductory Constitutions to different parts of the Corpus Iuris Civilis also indicate that a large number were eliminated in the compilation process. Although it can hardly be disputed that what the compilers chose to include in these two titles was an accurate account of the law of letting and hiring in force during the time of Justinian, it has been credibly suggested that these titles were given a specific focus in order to project a particular image of the Roman rental economy.

‘Furiously Mad’: Vagrancy Law and a Sub-Group of the Disorderly Poor

Rural History ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
AUDREY ECCLES
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Public ◽  
Course Of Action ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

Abstract:Madness has been a social problem from time immemorial. Wealthy lunatics were made royal wards so that their estates would be looked after, and the common law very early admitted madness and idiocy as conditions justifying the exemption of the sufferer from punishments for crime. But the vast majority of lunatics have never been either criminal or wealthy, and many wandered about begging, unwelcome in any settled community. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the law made some attempt to determine a course of action which would protect the public and theoretically also the lunatic. This legislation and its application in practice to protect the public, contain the lunatic, and deal with the nuisance caused by those ‘disordered in their senses’, form the subject of this article. Much has been written about the development of psychiatry, mainly from contemporary medical texts, and about the treatment of lunatics in institutions, chiefly from nineteenth-century sources, but much remains to be discovered from archival sources about the practicalities of dealing with lunatics at parish level, particularly how they were defined as lunatics, who made such decisions, and how they were treated in homes and workhouses.

scholarly journals Arbitration clause for an arbitral tribunal in Poland based on Art. 33 CMR Convention

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Rafał Adamus
Keyword(s):  
Complex Nature ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Arbitral Tribunal ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Arbitration Clause ◽  
Legal Relationship ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Uniform Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Given

In matters that are subject to the CMR Convention, under the rule of Art. 33 of this Convention, the arbitration court is obliged, first, to apply the CMR Convention and it is not permissible to apply, in place of the scope of the CMR Convention, another legal order or extra-legal principles. Secondly, as far as it results from the CMR Convention, the arbitration court should apply the applicable national law. Thirdly, the arbitration court settles the dispute according to the law applicable to a given relationship, and when the parties have expressly authorized it – in compliance with general principles of law or principles of equity. Fourthly, the arbitral tribunal takes into consideration the provisions of the contract and the established habits applicable to the given legal relationship. The arbitration agreement regarding the dispute subject to the CMR Convention will therefore be of a complex nature due to the requirement of Art. 33 of the CMR Convention as to the indication that a uniform law applies in arbitration proceedings – the subject of inter-city agreement. The parties should indicate the following in the content of the arbitration clause: 1) obligatory CMR convention, as required by Art. 33 CMR Convention 2) optional national law to which the CMR Convention refers, and in the absence of such an indication, the arbitration court will apply the law applicable to a given legal relationship, and possibly another national law to which the CMR Convention does not refer, although such a solution would be a source of many complications or general legal principles or rules of equity. For practical reasons, it is worth taking into account other issues, such as the language of the proceedings, in the arbitration clause.

Liberty and the Common Law

1945 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lord Wright
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Case System ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Right

In preparing the few and elementary observations which I am about to make to you tonight I have wondered if the title I chose was apt or suitable. The Common Law is generally described as the law of liberty, of freedom and of free peoples. It was a home-made product. In the eighteenth century, foreign lawyers called it an insular and barbarous system; they compared it to their own system of law, developed on the basis of Roman and Civil Law. Many centuries before, and long after Bracton's day, when other civilised European nations ‘received’ the Roman Law, England held back and stood aloof from the Reception. It must have been a near thing. It seems there could have been a Reception here if the Judges had been ecclesiastics, steeped in the Civil Law. But as it turned out they were laymen, and were content as they travelled the country, and in London as well, to adopt what we now know as the Case System, instead of the rules and categories of the Civil Law. Hence the method of threshing out problems by debate in Court, and later on the basis of written pleadings which we find in the Year Books. For present purposes, all I need observe is that the Civil Lawyer had a different idea of the relation of the state or the monarch to the individual from that of the Common Lawyer. To the Civil or Roman Lawyer, the dominant maxim was ‘quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem’; law was the will of the princeps. With this may be compared the rule expressed in Magna Carta in 1215: No freeman, it was there said, was to be taken or imprisoned or exiled or in any way destroyed save by the lawful judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Whatever the exact application of that phrase in 1215, it became a text for fixing the relations between the subject and the State. Holdsworth quotes from the Year Book of 1441; the law is the highest English inheritance the King hath, for by the law he and all his subjects are ruled. That was the old medieval doctrine that all things are governed by law, either human or divine. That is the old doctrine of the supremacy of the law, which runs through the whole of English history, and which in the seventeenth century won the day against the un-English doctrine of the divine right of Kings and of their autocratic power over the persons and property of their subjects. The more detailed definition of what all that involved took time to work out. I need scarcely refer to the great cases in the eighteenth century in which the Judges asserted the right of subjects to freedom from arbitrary arrest as against the ministers of state and against the validity of a warrant to seize the papers of a person accused of publishing a seditious libel; in particular Leach v. Money (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1001; Entick v. Carrington (1765) 19 St. Tr. 1029; Wilkes v. Halifax (1769) 19 St. Tr. 1406. In this connexion may be noted Fox's Libel Act, 1792, which dealt with procedure, but fixed a substantive right to a trial by jury of the main issue in the cases it referred to.

Grotius in the Science of Law

1925 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 685-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roscoe Pound
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Turning Point ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern History ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Theories Of Justice ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Almost All

It has been customary to take Grotius's book for the starting point of one of the best marked eras in the history of jurisprudence. Any account of the development of theories of justice is likely to begin the modern history of the subject with Grotius, and to put as a classical epoch a period designated as “from Grotius to Kant.” Any account of theories of law is likely to set off a period from the revived study of Roman law in the Italian universities of the twelfth century to Grotius, and another from Grotius to the breaking up of the eighteenth century law-of-nature school. In almost all accounts of the history of the science of law, Grotius stands as marking a turning point.

scholarly journals Abigeatus – mājlopu zādzība jeb aizdzīšana – kā noziedzīgs nodarījums pret īpašumu romiešu tiesībās

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (19) ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
Allars Apsītis ◽  
Osvalds Joksts
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
Current Article ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Impact

Rakstā atspoguļoti atsevišķi rezultāti no autoru realizētās romiešu tiesību pirmavotu izpētes saistībā ar tajos atrodamo informāciju par noziedzīgiem nodarījumiem pret īpašumu, kas mūsdienu Latvijā kriminalizēti Krimināllikuma 175. pantā “Zādzība”, 176. pantā “Laupīšana” un 179. pantā “Piesavināšanās”. Apskatīta un analizēta tiesiskā reglamentācija attiecībā uz abigeatus – mājlopu zādzību jeb aizdzīšanu, kas tika uzskatīta par bīstamāku un smagāku nodarījumu nekā parasta zādzība (lat. furtum) un tāpēc bargāk sodīta. Aplūkoti arī minētā noziedzīgā nodarījuma kvalifikācijas un sodīšanas politikas legālie kritēriji romiešu tiesībās. Saskaņā ar autoru informāciju Latvijas pētnieki šo tematiku visai maz apskatījuši, un pētījums varētu dot zināmu ieguldījumu nacionālās tiesību zinātnes attīstībā, īpaši jautājumā par romiešu tiesību principu ietekmi uz Latvijas Republikas normatīvajos aktos ietvertajiem mūsdienu tiesību institūtiem. The article deals with the results of research performed on the primary sources of the Roman Law regarding offences against property contemporaneity criminalised in the Criminal Law (Sections 175. Theft, 176. Robbery, 179. Misappropriation) of modern-day Latvia. It describes and analyses the Roman Law legal regulation regarding abigeatus – the offence of cattle stealing or “rustling” which was considered as a more dangerous and serious offense than ordinary theft (furtum) and therefore more severely punishable. According to the information in the possession of the authors, Latvian researchers have not yet in particular studied the current theme, and the publications in the Latvian language have not been detected yet. Accordingly, the current article could provide certain contributions to the development of the national field of law, especially regarding the impact of Roman legal principles on the development of modern legal institutes incorporated in the law of the Republic of Latvia.

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