Description: The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law is the first of its kind in the field of comparative ancient legal history. Written collaboratively by a dedicated team of international experts, each chapter offers a new framing and understanding of key legal concepts, practices and historical contexts across five major legal traditions of the ancient world. Stretching chronologically across more than three and a half millennia, from the earliest, very fragmentary, proto-cuneiform tablets (3200-3000 BCE) to the Tang Code of 652 CE, the volume challenges earlier comparative histories of ancient law / societies, at the same time as opening up new areas for future scholarship across a wealth of surviving ancient Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Greek and Roman primary source evidence. Topics covered include 'law as text', legal science, inter-polity relations, law and the state, law and religion, legal procedure, personal status and the family, crime, property and contract.
Brief description: CAROLINE HUMFRESS is Professor of History and Co-Director of the Institute of Legal and Constitutional Research at the University of St Andrews, and an L. Bates Lea Global Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She is a Philip Leverhulme Prize winner and recipient of Il Premio della Corte Costituzionale della Reppublica Italiana (awarded by the Gérard Boulvert Society for the Study of European Civilization). She has published widely on ancient and early medieval law, rhetoric and forensic practice, and their intersections with modern scholarship.
Review Quotes: ''The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law' is a wonderful book. Its very great strengths derive from its unusual history of composition, and the book is at its best when, in one way or another, writers actualize the volume's aspirations most sharply. It is never less than exciting and informative, and the patient collaboration among experts in different fields to which it testifies should be a model for future projects of this kind.' Clifford Ando, Comparative Legal History