Legalism: Community and Justice

Home >
Law >
Others >
Legalism: Community and Justice

Description
Contents
Author

Details
- An interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study of the complex relationships between justice, community, and law
- Takes an innovative approach to the study of law, deepening the intellectual debate developing across disciplines
- Grounds theoretical arguments with concrete evidence through the use of detailed empirical case studies
'Community' and 'justice' recur in anthropological, historical, and legal scholarship, yet as concepts they are notoriously slippery. Historians and lawyers look to anthropologists as 'community specialists', but anthropologists often avoid the concept through circumlocution: although much used (and abused) by historians, legal thinkers, and political philosophers, the term remains strikingly indeterminate and often morally overdetermined. 'Justice', meanwhile, is elusive, alternately invoked as the goal of contemporary political theorizing, and wrapped in obscure philosophical controversy. A conceptual knot emerges in much legal and political thought between law, justice, and community, but theories abound, without any agreement over concepts.

The contributors to this volume use empirical case studies to unpick threads of this knot. Local codes from Anglo-Saxon England, north Africa, and medieval Armenia indicate disjunctions between community boundaries and the subjects of local rules and categories; processes of justice from early modern Europe to eastern Tibet suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between law and justice; and practices of exile that recur throughout the world illustrate contingent formulations of community. In the first book in the series, Legalism: Anthropology and History, law was addressed through a focus on local legal categories as conceptual tools. Here this approach is extended to the ideas and ideals of justice and community. Rigorous cross-cultural comparison allows the contributors to avoid normative assumptions, while opening new avenues of inquiry for lawyers, anthropologists, and historians alike.

Readership: Historians and anthropologists with an interest in law. Academics and law students working on legal history, comparative law, and the general philosophy of law.
Fernanda Pirie and Judith Scheele: Introduction: Law, Justice, and Community
1: Robert Thomson: From Theology to Law: Creating an Armenian Secular Lawcode
2: Alice Taylor: Lex scripta and the Problem of Enforcement: Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, and Scottish Law Compared
3: Paul Dresch: Outlawry, Exile, and Banishment: Reflections on Community and Justice
4: Patrick Lantschner: Justice Contested and Affirmed: Jurisdiction and Conflict in Late Medieval Italian Cities
5: James McComish: Defining Boundaries: Law, Justice, and Community in Sixteenth-Century England
6: John Sabapathy: Regulating Community and Society at the Sorbonne in the Late Thirteenth Century
7: Judith Scheele: Community as an Achievement: Kabyle Customary Law and Beyond
8: Martin Ingram: 'Popular' and 'Official' Justice: Punishing Sexual Offenders in Tudor London
9: Fernanda Pirie: Community, Justice, and Legalism: Elusive Concepts in Tibet
Fernanda Pirie is University Lecturer in socio-legal studies at the University of Oxford, and Director of the University's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. An anthropologist by training, following a career at the London Bar, she has carried out fieldwork for over a decade on the Tibetan plateau. Her studies have centred on conflict resolution, social order, and tribe-state relation. She is the author of The Anthropology of Law (2013).

Judith Scheele is a social anthropologist and a post-doctoral research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her research focuses on North Africa and the Sahara, in particular Algeria, Mali, and Chad. Her publications includeVillage Matters: Knowledge, Politics and Community in Kabylia (2009) and Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara: Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (2012).

The authors are among the coordinators of the Oxford Legalism project, which brings together scholars from law, history, anthropology, classics, and oriental studies in a series of seminars and workshops, to compare examples of legalistic thought, texts, and practices, from across the world.

Contributors:
Paul Dresch is a Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in Social Anthropology
Martin Ingram is CUF Lecturer in Modern History in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford
Patrick Lantschner is a Junior Research Fellow in Medieval History in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford
James McComish is the Slaughter and May Teaching Fellow in Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge
Fernanda Pirie is University Lecturer and Director, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford
John Sabapathy is Lecturer in Medieval History at University College London
Judith Scheele is a post-doctoral research fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Alice Taylor is Lecturer in Medieval History at King's College London
Robert Thomson is the former Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford