The Moral World of the Law

by Edited by Peter Coss

• ISBN13: 9780521640596
• ISBN10: 0521640598
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The dominant and deceptively simple theme of this book is the relationship between the moral environment of the courtroom and that of the society in which the court is situated. The volume ranges widely across time and space, from ancient Greece to twentieth-century Africa. As a consequence, it encompasses not only the highly professional legal systems of the Roman, later medieval and modern worlds, but also the relatively unprofessionalized courts of classical Athens and of the early Middle Ages and the alien, imposed legal systems of colonial Rhodesia and Kenya.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	ix
Preface	xi
Introduction	1	(16)
Peter Coss
The language of law in Classical Athens	17	(20)
S.C. Todd
The autonomy of Roman law	37	(11)
Andrew D.E. Lewis
Local participation and legal ritual in early medieval law courts	48	(14)
Wendy Davies
Due process versus the maintenance of order in European law: the contribution of the ius commune	62	(29)
Paul Hyams
Inside the courtroom: lawyers, litigants and justices in England in the later middle ages	91	(22)
Paul Brand
`Nemo mortalis cognitus vivit in evo': moral and legal conflicts in a Florentine inheritance case of 1442	113	(21)
Thomas Kuehn
Law, litigants and the construction of `honour': slander suits in early modern England	134	(27)
Martin Ingram
Story-telling and the social imagery of religious conflict in nineteenth-century French law courts	161	(17)
Caroline Ford
`Their idea of justice is so peculiar': Southern Rhodesia 1890-1910	178	(18)
Diana Jeater
Kenyatta's trials: breaking and making an African nationalist	196	(44)
John Lonsdale
Conclusion	240	(10)
Chris Wickham
Index	250