Study sheet: World History of Law

📋 Course Outline

1. Law and Social Organization
2. Mesopotamian and Egyptian Law
3. Chinese Legal Traditions
4. Precolonial African Legal Systems
5. Pre-Columbian American Law
6. Origins of Common Law
7. Equity and Its Remedies
8. Core Features of Common Law

📖 1. Law and Social Organization

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Law : a system of rules that organizes relationships within a society

★ Must-know

• The history of law largely overlaps with the history of civilizations because each organized society develops rules, procedures, and institutions.

Further detail

📌 Legal systems vary according to whether they are oral or written, religious or secular, and based on custom or legislation.

• The Roman formula ubi societas, ibi ius means “where there is society, there is law.”

💡 Memory Hook

Social life → shared rules → organized society

📖 2. Mesopotamian and Egyptian Law

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Code of Ur-Nammu : The Code of Ur-Nammu, dating from around 2100 BCE, is the oldest known Mesopotamian legal collection and favors pecuniary sanctions over corporal punishment.
• Ma’at : the Egyptian conception of cosmic order, justice, and balance, which the pharaoh was responsible for maintaining

★ Must-know

• Written law emerged when growing communities, settled agriculture, and the formation of states created a need for stable written rules, toward the end of the fourth millennium BCE in the Fertile Crescent.

• The Code of Hammurabi, promulgated around 1750 BCE, contains 282 articles and applies a casuistic logic in which sanctions vary according to social status.

Further detail

• Egyptian women could own property, enter contracts, bring legal actions, and divorce.

💡 Memory Hook

Written Mesopotamian codes versus Egyptian Ma’at

📖 3. Chinese Legal Traditions

★ Must-know

📌 Confucianism seeks order through virtue and respect for rites, whereas Legalism relies on clear, severe, and impartial laws.

• The Code of the Tang, promulgated in 653, combined Legalist tools with Confucian principles and influenced Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese law.

Further detail

• Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE and regarded penal law as a crude instrument for people unable to follow the proper way.

• Han Feizi, who lived around 280–233 BCE, was a leading representative of Legalism.

💡 Memory Hook

Confucian virtue versus Legalist coercion

📖 4. Precolonial African Legal Systems

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• African legal oral tradition : transmitted rules through elders, griots, and customary chiefs, while preserving customs with considerable precision and flexibility

★ Must-know

• Precolonial African legal systems were highly diverse, with hundreds of distinct systems ranging from organized Sahelian kingdoms to segmentary societies.

• African dispute resolution generally sought to restore collective harmony by public discussion led by elders and a solution accepted by the community.

Further detail

• Colonization imposed imported laws without always abolishing customary systems, creating legal pluralism that remains widespread.

💡 Memory Hook

O-C-R: Orality, Community, Religion

📖 5. Pre-Columbian American Law

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Inca legal precepts : The three central Inca precepts were ama sua, ama llulla, and ama quella, meaning “do not steal, do not lie, and do not be lazy.”

★ Must-know

• Maya civilization, organized into city-states from the third to the ninth century, distinguished offenses according to whether the offender was noble or commoner and used sanctions ranging from fines to death.

• Aztec law provided specialized tribunals in Tenochtitlan and could punish public drunkenness, adultery, and theft by death.

Further detail

• The Inca used quipus and had no written legal codes, but their oral tradition was coherent and organized collective labor.

💡 Memory Hook

Maya → Aztec → Inca

📖 6. Origins of Common Law

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Writ system : written chancery orders that allowed a claimant to bring a specific wrong before a royal court

📝 Essential Points

• In 1066, the Norman conquest began the centralization of English royal justice that led to common law.

• Henry II Plantagenet, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, established itinerant royal judges and the writ system, making him the principal founder of common law.

📌 Under the forms of action, each writ corresponded to a procedure and a type of action, so remedies preceded rights in English law.

💡 Memory Hook

1066 → royal judges → writs → common law

📖 7. Equity and Its Remedies

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Equity : a complementary body of rules developed to remedy the rigidity of the common-law writ system through conscience and moral principles

★ Must-know

• Equity introduced institutions such as:

  • the trust
  • the injunction
  • specific performance

• The Judicature Acts of 1873–1875 fused the common-law and chancery jurisdictions while preserving their conceptual distinction.

Further detail

• From the fourteenth century, disappointed litigants petitioned the king, who referred their claims to the Lord Chancellor for equitable judgment.

💡 Memory Hook

Rigid common-law forms versus flexible equitable remedies

📖 8. Core Features of Common Law

★ Must-know

• Under stare decisis, decisions of higher courts bind lower courts, allowing law to develop through accumulated judgments.

• Ratio decidendi is the principle necessary for a decision, whereas obiter dicta are incidental judicial observations.

• The common-law trial is oral and adversarial, with parties responsible for presenting proof, whereas the continental inquisitorial judge investigates the case.

• Common law has no general private-law codification comparable to the French Civil Code, although statute law has become increasingly important.

Further detail

• The common-law tradition spread worldwide through the British Empire and became a major source of legal innovation in the United States through the Supreme Court’s constitutional role.

💡 Memory Hook

P-P-L-C: Precedent, Procedure, Legislation, Codification

📊 Synthesis Tables

Mesopotamian and Egyptian Law

Dimension	Mesopotamia	Egypt
Main source	Written legal collections and tablets	Royal decrees and applied Ma’at
Legal logic	Casuistic rules with stated sanctions	Flexible application of cosmic order and justice
Institutional role	Kings promulgated collections	Pharaoh and viziers applied Ma’at
Historical legacy	Strong textual transmission	Limited direct transmission because of absent systematic codification