Law-Making at Athens at the end of the Fifth Century B.C.

1955 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 26-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. W. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Public Law ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Legal Sense ◽  
Law Making

For students of Athenian private and public law it is a painful, but undeniable fact that there is still grave uncertainty as to the precise methods by which statutes, one of the most important sources of law, were made at the most formative period of the history of the system from the middle of the fifth century B.C. onwards. There have been two fairly recent and conflicting attempts to clear up some of the main points, those of Kahrstedt and of Mrs. Atkinson. Neither treatment seems wholly satisfactory, and in particular neither seems to take any account of J. H. Oliver's publication of additions to the code or of Ferguson's paper on these same additions. It may therefore be worthwhile re-examining the evidence for one chapter at least of the story, the chapter covering roughly the twenty years beginning in 411 B.C.I cannot avoid a word on sources, in the historical not the legal sense. In the literary field historians and political theorists are very unhelpful. The problem does not seem to have interested them. Here therefore we have to rely mainly on two other classes of authority, firstly, grammarians and lexicographers, who were interested in the archaisms of the laws of Drakon and Solon, secondly, and most fruitful of all, the orators. In the orators we must distinguish between the documents cited in the texts and the orators' own words. I do not discuss the validity of the cited documents, but must content myself with saying that with regard to the more important documents which are here relevant there is now fairly general agreement among scholars that they are genuine. Statements of the orators themselves must always be examined under the microscope and allowance made for possible distortions due to the speaker's desire to support the particular point which he is making.

Law-making at Athens in the fourth century B.C.

1975 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 62-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. MacDowell
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Important Change ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Law Making ◽  
Made In

It is now twenty years since A. R. W. Harrison remarked in this Journal ‘For students of Athenian private and public law it is a painful, but undeniable fact that there is still grave uncertainty as to the precise methods by which statutes, one of the most important sources of law, were made at the most formative period of the history of the system from the middle of the fifth century B.C. onwards.’ His own article is entitled ‘Law-making at Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C.’ and is concerned primarily with establishing that an important change was made in or soon after the year 403/2. That was the date at which a new procedure for making laws (nomoi) was introduced, which Harrison calls ‘the fourth-century procedure of nomothesia’, involving officials called νομοθέται. Before then there was no procedural difference between making a nomos and making a psephisma. References to nomothetai in texts before 403 are irrelevant. In 403 the decree of Teisamenos laid down a procedure for review and amendment of laws, involving two distinct bodies of nomothetai; but that was a procedure for one particular occasion. The regular procedure was instituted shortly afterwards, and was to some extent modelled on the procedure of the Teisamenos decree.

Offenses Against Human Beings in Private and Public Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 34-44
Author(s):  
Eckart Otto
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of

This chapter deals with the legal functions of law of different literary genres in the Hebrew Bible and their legal historical development within their societal “settings in life. It concentrates on laws of bodily injuries and homicide in a comparative approach with ancient Near Eastern law and asks for the influence of religion on the legal history of the biblical law of offenses against human beings and for trends of correlating law and narrative in the Pentateuch. Special attention is given to the origins of talionic retaliation in cuneiform law and to the efforts in biblical law already in the Covenant Code to check and repeal the talio.

scholarly journals “Belated” reflections on convergence in law. Review of the monograph by N.M. Korshunov “Convergence of private and public law: problems of theory and practice» (Moscow: “NORM” Publ., 2011. 240 p.)

2021 ◽  
pp. 344-353
Author(s):  
Vladimir Baranov ◽  
Yuri Mareev
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Legal Science ◽  
New Development ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
The One

The focus of the innovative work of N. M. Korshunov is such that the problem of technical and legal support for the convergence of private and public law was not given special attention not only in Russian, but also in foreign legal science. Although, of course, considering the substantive processes of legal convergence, he was "forced" to touch on the technique of their design.In the theory of law in general, and in the theory of civil law in particular, there are few problems that are comparable in complexity, scale, severity and age to the one that served as the reason and source material for the reviewed book. Two principles – the private and the public –form two poles, the interaction of which determines the forms of organization of public relations within the boundaries of legal reality, and recently especially actively – in the field of civil turnover. The list of publications that are only directly devoted to this subject is vast, and it is not easy to point to at least one legal work of any theoretical significance, where it is not touched upon in one way or another. In the history of legal science, including in the history of civil law, there was no example of any satisfactory solution to this problem. In this context, the monograph of N. M. Korshunova, seemingly initially doomed by fate to the role of another hopeless attempt to take a height that exceeds human strength, and at best-a new set of deep and original judgments, but not forming together a coherent theory of the phenomenon, nevertheless deserves to be noted as an example of a completely new development of the old topic.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad

2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-99
Author(s):  
Frederick S. Colby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Despite the central importance of festival and devotional piety to premodernMuslims, book-length studies in this field have been relatively rare.Katz’s work, The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad, represents a tour-deforceof critical scholarship that advances the field significantly both throughits engagement with textual sources from the formative period to the presentand through its judicious use of theoretical tools to analyze this material. Asits title suggests, the work strives to explore how Muslims have alternativelypromoted and contested the commemoration of the Prophet’s birth atdifferent points in history, with a particular emphasis on how the devotionalistapproach, which was prominent in the pre-modern era, fell out of favoramong Middle Eastern Sunnis in the late twentieth century. Aimed primarilyat specialists in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, especially scholarsof history, law, and religion, this work is recommended to anyone interestedin the history of Muslim ritual, the history of devotion to the Prophet, andthe interplay between normative and non-normative forms ofMuslim beliefand practice ...

Epidemics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Psychological Consequences ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This book challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics. From an interdisciplinary array of scholars, a consensus has emerged: invariably, epidemics in past times provoked class hatred, blame of the ‘other’, or victimization of the diseases’ victims. It is also claimed that when diseases were mysterious, without cures or preventive measures, they more readily provoked ‘sinister connotations’. The evidence for these assumptions, however, comes from a handful of examples—the Black Death, the Great Pox at the end of the sixteenth century, cholera riots of the 1830s, and AIDS, centred almost exclusively on the US experience. By investigating thousands of descriptions of epidemics, reaching back before the fifth-century BCE Plague of Athens to the eruption of Ebola in 2014, this study traces epidemics’ socio-psychological consequences across time and discovers a radically different picture. First, scholars, especially post-AIDS, have missed a fundamental aspect of the history of epidemics: their remarkable power to unify societies across class, race, ethnicity, and religion, spurring self-sacrifice and compassion. Second, hatred and violence cannot be relegated to a time when diseases were mysterious, before the ‘laboratory revolution’ of the late nineteenth century: in fact, modernity was the great incubator of a disease–hate nexus. Third, even with diseases that have tended to provoke hatred, such as smallpox, poliomyelitis, plague, and cholera, blaming ‘the other’ or victimizing disease bearers has been rare. Instead, the history of epidemics and their socio-psychological consequences has been richer and more varied than scholars and public intellectuals have heretofore allowed.

The Experience of Poetry

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Attridge
Keyword(s):  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

The question this book addresses is whether, in addition to its other roles, poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—has, across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson’s Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616, continuously afforded the pleasurable experience we identify with the crafting of language into memorable and moving rhythmic forms. Parts I and II examine the evidence for the performance of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of Ancient Greek lyric poetry, the impact of the invention of writing on Alexandrian verse, the performances of poetry that characterized Ancient Rome, and the private and public venues for poetic experience in Late Antiquity. Part III deals with medieval verse, exploring the oral traditions that spread across Europe in the vernacular languages, the importance of manuscript transmission, the shift from roll to codex and from papyrus to parchment, and the changing audiences for poetry. Part IV explores the achievements of the English Renaissance, from the manuscript verse of Henry VIII’s court to the anthologies and collections of the late Elizabethan period. Among the topics considered in this part are the advent of print, the experience of the solitary reader, the continuing significance of manuscript circulation, the presence of poet figures in pageants and progresses, and the appearance of poets on the Elizabethan stage. Tracking both continuity and change, the book offers a history of what, over these twenty-five centuries, it has meant to enjoy a poem.

Private and Public Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 574-592
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Law And Economics ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
General Criterion ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Ordering ◽  
Public Rights ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Derivatives Of

This chapter explores the relationship between private and public law. In civil law countries, the public-private distinction serves as an organizing principle of the entire legal system. In common law jurisdictions, the distinction is at best an implicit design principle and is used primarily as an informal device for categorizing different fields of law. Even if not explicitly recognized as an organizing principle, however, it is plausible that private and public law perform distinct functions. Private law supplies the tools that make private ordering possible—the discretionary decisions that individuals make in structuring their lives. Public law is concerned with providing public goods—broadly defined—that cannot be adequately supplied by private ordering. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, various schools of thought derived from utilitarianism have assimilated both private and public rights to the same general criterion of aggregate welfare analysis. This has left judges with no clear conception of the distinction between private and public law. Another problematic feature of modern legal thought is a curious inversion in which scholars who focus on fields of private law have turned increasingly to law and economics, one of the derivatives of utilitarianism, whereas scholars who concern themselves with public law are increasingly drawn to new versions of natural rights thinking, in the form of universal human rights.

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