Legalism

Legalism
Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Total Pages : 366
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780191641466
ISBN-13 : 0191641464
Rating : 4/5 (464 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Legalism by : Paul Dresch

Download or read book Legalism written by Paul Dresch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law and law-like institutions are visible in human societies very distant from each other in time and space. When it comes to observing and analysing such social constructs historians, anthropologists, and lawyers run into notorious difficulties in how to conceptualize them. Do they conform to a single category of 'law'? How are divergent understandings of the nature and purpose of law to be described and explained? Such questions reach to the heart of philosophical attempts to understand the nature of law, but arise whenever we are confronted by law-like practices and concepts in societies not our own. In this volume leading historians and anthropologists with an interest in law gather to analyse the nature and meaning of law in diverse societies. They start from the concept of legalism, taken from the anthropologist Lloyd Fallers, whose 1960s work on Africa engaged, unusually, with jurisprudence. The concept highlights appeal to categories and rules. The degree to which legalism in this sense informs people's lives varies within and between societies, and over time, but it can colour equally both 'simple' and 'complex' law. Breaking with recent emphases on 'practice', nine specialist contributors explore, in a wide-ranging set of cases, the place of legalism in the workings of social life. The essays make obvious the need to question our parochial common sense where ideals of moral order at other times and places differ from those of modern North Atlantic governance. State-centred law, for instance, is far from a 'central case'. Legalism may be 'aspirational', connecting people to wider visions of morality; duty may be as prominent a theme as rights; and rulers from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century Burma appropriate, as much they impose, a vision of justice as consistency. The use of explicit categories and rules does not reduce to simple questions of power. The cases explored range from ancient Asia Minor to classical India, and from medieval England and France to Saharan oases and southern Arabia. In each case they assume no knowledge of the society or legal system discussed. The volume will appeal not only to historians and anthropologists with an interest in law, but to students of law engaged in legal theory, for the light it sheds on the strengths and limitations of abstract legal philosophy.


Legalism Related Books

Legalism
Language: en
Pages: 366
Authors: Paul Dresch
Categories: Law
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-08-30 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Law and law-like institutions are visible in human societies very distant from each other in time and space. When it comes to observing and analysing such socia
Legalism
Language: en
Pages: 321
Authors: Georgy Kantor
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume brings together anthropologists and historians to examine how property and ownership operate and are understood across contexts ranging from Roman p
Legalism
Language: en
Pages: 321
Authors: Fernanda Pirie
Categories: Law
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014 - Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bringing together a multidisciplinary team to address issues of community and justice, this volume uses empirical case studies to untangle the complex relations
The Anthropology of Law
Language: en
Pages: 281
Authors: Fernanda Pirie
Categories: Law
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-10 - Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Questions about the nature of law, its relationship with custom, and the form of legal rules, categories and claims, are placed at the centre of this challengi
Lawyers and Savages
Language: en
Pages: 233
Authors: Kaius Tuori
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-09-19 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Legal primitivism was a complex phenomenon that combined the study of early European legal traditions with studies of the legal customs of indigenous peoples. L