scholarly journals Importing the law? Possible elements of the Mesopotamian legal tradition in New Kingdom Egypt (1549-1064BCE)

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandre Loktionov
Keyword(s):  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
New Kingdom ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Standard Element ◽  
The Law ◽  
Seti I

 Features of New Kingdom (1549-1064BCE[1]) justice not attested earlierOracle courts, as attested at Deir el-Medina[2] and elsewhere[3]Increase in severe corporal punishment: for example, mutilation of nose and ears becomes a standard element in oath formulae[4]Detailed protasis-apodosis legal decrees, such as the Karnak Decree of Horemheb[5] (1328-1298BCE) or the Nauri Decree of Seti I[6] (1296-1279).  Why might this be connected to Mesopotamia/Semitic law?“Hyksos” period (1650-1549BCE) immediately prior to New KingdomAmarna letters/greater exposure to Akkadian in Egypt during New KingdomLegal associations: Akkadian and Egyptian copies of Ramesses II – Hattusili III treaty[7] (1258BCE), where corporal punishment is a prominent topicMesopotamian law, and broader scholarship, often associated with protasis-apodosis[8]Mesopotamian law often associated with severe corporal punishment: for instance, see Code of Hammurabi (1792-1750BCE)[9], Middle Assyrian Laws[10] (c.1400-1100BCE) etc.Why might this NOT be connected to Mesopotamia/Semitic law?Were earlier periods truly different, or is this down to chance preservation of sources?Protasis-apodosis has precedents in the Middle Kingdom (2066-1650BCE): for instance, see 2nd Semna stela of Senusret III (1865BCE)[11] or Illahun Medical papyri (c.1800BCE)[12]. [1] All Egyptian dates are calculated according to the chronology set forth in Dodson & Hilton 2004: 287-294, while Mesopotamian dates follow the chronology in van de Mieroop 2007: 302-317.[2] McDowell 1990: 143-186.[3] Kákosy 1975: 600-606; Černy 1962: 35-48.[4] Lorton 1977: 33-38, 50-51; Tyldesley 2000: 81.[5] Kruchten 1981.[6] Kitchen 1975-1990: 53-55 (text 24); Davies 1997: 277-308.[7] Langdon & Gardiner 1920.[8] Bottéro 1992: 125-137, 156-184; Roth 1997.[9] Roth 1997: 71-142; Richardson 2000.[10] Driver & Miles 1935; Roth 1997: 153-194.[11] Sethe 1924: 83-84.[12] Quirke 2002; Collier & Quirke 2004: 53-64.

From the Law of Ransom to the Law of Release

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Law ◽  
New System

This chapter charts the “Law of Release,” a new system of rules that replaced the Law of Ransom. These rules were based on treaties signed from 1739 onward, but also on a variety of lesser agreements and unwritten understandings and the Islamic legal tradition. They were renewed frequently, and structured captivity as late as the 1850s. This chapter will explore the basic structures of the Law of Release—how captives were found, released, and sent home, and how slaveowners were convinced, coerced, or compensated to cooperate. I argue that while release was initially limited to Istanbul, and to the most visible captives, it extended both into elite households, and outward along the Ottoman corridors of power. This process tested the limits of the Ottoman state, forcing the state to cooperate with Russian officials for the benefit of both. They did so in the face of resistance from captors.

Utilitarianism and the Criminal Law in Colonial India: A Study of the Practical Limits of Utilitarian Jurisprudence

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 739-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartik Kalyan Raman
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
British India ◽  
Local Society ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Penal Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
Common Observation ◽  
The One

The role of legal tradition in the reformist rhetoric of Benthamite Utilitarianism presents us with a contradiction. On the one hand, there is the common observation that Utilitarian jurisprudence was necessarily ahistorical and rejected the past as a source of concepts for reworking the criminal justice system existing in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For philosophic reformers such as Bentham, contemporary British criminal justice was to be replaced by a scientific jurisprudence, abstract, universal, and secular in outlook, and antipathetic to the more conservative insistence that the foundations of the penal law continue to be tradition-based. ‘If society was to see any improvement, its law must be reformed; if its law was to be reformed it must be burned to the ground and rebuilt according to a new and rational pattern.’ On the other hand, we find that the very same Utilitarian thinkers, in works describing the state of the law in British India, were concerned with local rather than universal conceptions of criminality. In his 1782 Essay on the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation, Bentham, for instance, urged the philosophic reformer to temper change in India by fitting Utilitarian judgments about the law to the frames of local society.

Towards a Transsystemic Study of the Ghana Legal System

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Poku Adusei
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Cultural Dialogue

This article provides comprehensive insights into the study of the Ghana legal system as an academic discipline in the law faculties in Ghana. It urges the view that the study of the Ghana legal system, as an academic discipline, should be transsystemic. Transsystemic pedagogy consists in the introduction of ideas, structures and principles which may be drawn from different legal traditions such as civil law, common law, religion-based law, African law and socialist law traditions to influence the study of law. Transsystemia involves teaching law ‘across,’ ‘through,’ and ‘beyond’ disciplinary fixations associated with a particular legal system. It is a mode of scholarship that defies biased allegiance to one legal tradition in order to foster cross-cultural dialogue among legal traditions. It involves a study of law that re-directs focus from one concerned with ‘pure’ legal system to a discourse that is grounded on multiple legal traditions.

scholarly journals On the rule of law and the quality of the law: reflections of the constitutional-turned-international judge

2019 ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Egidijus Küris
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Derechos Humanos ◽  
European Court ◽  
The Law

Western legal tradition gave the birth to the concept of the rule of law. Legal theory and constitutional justice significantly contributed to the crystallisation of its standards and to moving into the direction of the common concept of the rule of law. The European Court of Human Rights uses this concept as an interpretative tool, the extension of which is the quality of the law doctrine, which encompasses concrete requirements for the law under examination in this Court, such as prospectivity of law, its foreseeability, clarity etc. The author of the article, former judge of the Lithuanian Constitutional Court and currently the judge of the European Court of Human Rights, examines how the latter court has gradually intensified (not always consistently) its reliance on the rule of law as a general principle, inherent in all the Articles of the European Convention on Human Rights, to the extent that in some of its judgments it concentrates not anymore on the factual situation of an individual applicant, but, first and foremost, on the examination of the quality of the law. The trend is that, having found the quality of the applicable law to be insufficient, the Court considers that the mere existence of contested legislation amounts to an unjustifiable interference into a respective right and finds a violation of respective provisions of the Convention. This is an indication of the Court’s progressing self-approximation to constitutional courts, which are called to exercise abstract norm-control.La tradición occidental alumbró la noción del Estado de Derecho. La teoría del Derecho y la Justicia Constitucional han contribuido decisivamente a la cristalización de sus estándares, ayudando a conformar un acervo común en torno al mismo. El Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos emplea la noción de Estado de Derecho como una herramienta interpretativa, fundamentalmente centrada en la doctrina de la calidad de la ley, que implica requisitos concretos que exige el Tribunal tales como la claridad, la previsibilidad, y la certeza en la redacción y aplicación de la norma. El autor, en la actualidad Juez del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos y anterior Magistrado del Tribunal Constitucional de Lituania, examina cómo el primero ha intensificado gradualmente (no siempre de forma igual de consistente) su confianza en el Estado de Derecho como principio general, inherente a todos los preceptos que forman el Convenio Europeo de Derechos Humanos, hasta el punto de que en algunas de sus resoluciones se concentra no tanto en la situación de hecho del demandante individual sino, sobre todo y ante todo, en el examen de esa calidad de la ley. La tendencia del Tribunal es a considerar que, si observa que la ley no goza de calidad suficiente, la mera existencia de la legislación discutida supone una interferencia injustificable dentro del derecho en cuestión y declara la violación del precepto correspondiente del Convenio. Esto implica el acercamiento progresivo del Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos a los Tribunales Constitucionales, quienes tienen encargado el control en abstracto de la norma legal.

scholarly journals Las estacas de madera de Haraga y la pesca en el-Fayum durante el Reino Medio

2020 ◽  
pp. 331-367
Author(s):  
María Teresa Soria-Trastoy ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Record ◽  
New Kingdom ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Fishing Gears ◽  
Catching Methods

In 1923, Reginald Engelbach published the report of the works carried out from 1913 to 1914 in the excavation of the tombs of Haraga. In one of the structures of C Cemetery, Engelbach found a set of objects that he called fisherman’s equipment, comprising the remains of fishing nets, floats, net weights and wooden stakes. In this article, which is a summary of one of the chapters of the author’s doctoral thesis, she analyses the fishing instruments from Haraga and exposes the methods of capture in which stakes are used. The text is concluded with a proposal of the fishing gears and catching methods that could have been used in el-Fayum from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom by means of a diachronic perspective and the ichthyological species possibly caught. In order to accomplish this goal, the author uses the archaeological record and other sources such as iconographic, documentary and ethnographic ones

Nubians in Egypt from the Early Dynastic Period to the New Kingdom

2021 ◽  
pp. 288-308
Author(s):  
Georg K. Meurer
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Population ◽  
Nile Valley ◽  
New Kingdom ◽  
Middle Kingdom ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Upper Egypt ◽  
Intermediate Period ◽  
Early Dynastic

Nubians lived in Egypt from Predynastic times and through all periods. In the Aswan region, they were part of the indigenous population from Old to Middle Kingdom (A-Group, C-Group). From late Middle Kingdom through Second Intermediate Period, representatives of the Pan-Grave culture, presumably to be identified with the Medjay, and later the Kerma culture was present in Upper Egypt (Theban area) progressively up to the Delta at Tell el-Dab’a until the 18th Dynasty. Despite the official Egyptian dogma that regarded foreigners as elements of chaos, the reality shows that Nubians were integrated in the Egyptian society when accepting the Egyptian way of life. This is also visible in the wider range of occupations performed by native Nubians. While from time to time foreign groups also left the Egyptian Nile Valley, this Egyptianization or cultural entanglement resulted in a disappearing of foreigners in the sources.

Conservative Representations of Executions

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-84
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Taïeb
Keyword(s):  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Good Death ◽  
Political Force ◽  
The Public ◽  
Civilizing Process ◽  
The Law ◽  
Public Executions

Executionary publicity was not universally contested. Many people were still attached to the show of political force embodied by public executions, as well as the opportunity to morally “test” oneself. Faced with the advocates of this form of “brutalization,” the chapter examines the arguments that backed the preservation of public rituals of execution. It includes discussions about the demand for exemplarity and attempts to delegitimize the regime in its attempts to reform the Criminal Code; the plan to restore the use of corporal punishment and the whip as a deterrent to crime; the people's thirst for the guillotine in the wake of the Soleilland affair paradoxically led to a major victory for the pro-death-penalty camp; compartmentalization of the civilizing process and insensitivity to suffering of the general populace; the executions, brutalization and glorification of the violence of war; the diffusion of military values in service of executions being conditioned by “trivialization”; a martial relationship to executions, executions that attracted spectators; lastly the transforming of an execution into a good death “by self-punishment” and a “good death” by convincing the public that punishment was administered by an autonomous individual to himself rather than by the law.

Child Protection through the Criminal Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Kenneth McK. Norrie
Keyword(s):  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Charge

The earliest criminal law dealing with children differently from the adult population was that concerned with sexual offences. This chapter explores the changing policies of the law, from the late 19th century fear of girls being exposed to immorality and boys being exposed to homosexuality, through the more protective 20th century legislation which nevertheless hung on to old ideas of immorality and criminality, until the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Act 2009 focused almost (but not quite) exclusively on protection from harm and from exploitation. The chapter then turns to the crime of child cruelty or neglect from its earliest manifestation in the common law to its statutory formulation in Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889, which, re-enacted in 1937, took on a form that, for all intents and purposes, remains to this day. The last part of the chapter explores the legal basis for the power of corporal punishment – the defence previously available to parents, teachers and some others to a charge of assault of a child, known as “reasonable” chastisement. Its gradual abolition from the 1980s to 2019 is described.

scholarly journals Why Adolf Hitler Spared the Judges: Judicial Opposition Against the Nazi State

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-878 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Petter Graver
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Theory ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Path Dependence ◽  
German Law ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Nazi Regime ◽  
Adolf Hitler ◽  
Independent Judiciary ◽  
The Law ◽  
Autonomous Institution

The Nazi regime had loyal judges who willingly transformed the liberal German law into an instrument of oppression, discrimination and genocide. This was achieved without substantially interfering with the operation of the courts and without applying disciplinary measures on the judges. But, not all judges were congenial servants of the regime—some resisted in their capacity as judges. Based on case-studies and existing literature, this Article distinguishes between two different lines of judicial opposition to those in power: Between opposition taking place in the open and opposition in secret, and between opposition within what is accepted by those in power as being within the law and opposition that is in breach of the law. The Article then seeks to explain the deference the regime gave to judicial by employing institutional theory and the concept of path dependence. Germany was deeply embedded in the Western legal tradition of emphasis on law as an autonomous institution with an independent judiciary.

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