PRIVACY Lecture: From private to public: how the earliest laws defined justice
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the University of Oxford, based at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.
Abstract:
From private to public: how the earliest laws defined justice
Many of the earliest laws to be written had constitutional significance. Mesopotamian kings commissioned codes to demonstrate their divinely favoured status; the Dharmaśāstras spelled out the caste hierarchy in Hindu India; the Old Testament laws formed part of God’s covenant with his people; while the Twelve Tables asserted Roman citizens’ rights. Yet the content of these early laws almost uniformly concerned private matters – debt and debt bondage, compensation for injuries, divorce, the care of children, theft, and so on. They regulated relations between private citizens, that is, rather than public life. The question I address in this presentation is how these private rules acquired their constitutional significance. By setting out rules for how justice should be administered, laws subject private matters to public standards. They make social relations that might otherwise have been negotiated directly into matters of legal accountability. More than that, I will suggest by confirming the authority of those responsible for guaranteeing and meting out justice, these laws also spoke to issues of broader constitutional and political concern.
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Bio:
Fernanda Pirie is Professor of the Anthropology of Law at the University of Oxford, based at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She has carried out ethnographic fieldwork at both ends of the Tibetan plateau and also conducted historical work on Tibetan legal texts. She uses anthropological and comparative methods to compare legal practices and texts from around the world.
The Rule of Laws: a 4,000-year quest to order the world (Profile Books, Basic Books, 2021), her most recent book, is a global history of law. It traces the rise and fall of the world’s major legal systems and compares examples of historic law-making worldwide.
In her earlier monograph, The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013), Fernanda addresses the nature of law as a social form, as well as analysing its role in societies. This approach builds on themes and debates developed in the Oxford Legalism project, a collaboration between scholars from anthropology, history, and other disciplines, which produced four edited volumes (Legalism, OUP, 4 vols).
Fernanda’s research on Tibetan legal texts was funded by the AHRC and established a web-site containing source material (https://tibetanlaw.org/project) as well as several publications on the nature of Tibetan law and its relationship with Buddhism. She has also has worked with historians of the region in two ANR/DFG projects to develop the social history of Tibet.
Fernanda is currently writing on global and historic comparative law themes while developing a further research project on historic Tibetan legal texts.