The Rule of LawsThe Rule of Laws

"From Hammurabi to Chinese emperors, Indian kings, and Russian princes, rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order on their people. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. People used laws too, to map out the societies they wanted to create and to express their diverse visions for a better world. In The Rules of Laws, Oxford scholar Fernanda Pirie examines over four thousand years of human history, tracing the rise and fall of the sophisticated legal systems that underpinned ancient empires, and showing how religious leaders, citizen assemblies, and ordinary people also called on laws to define communities, build civilizations and, often, to resist the rule of the powerful. Pirie describes how Indian brahmins, Islamic scholars, Jewish rabbis, and Armenian clerics enshrined the words of God in their laws, along with the moral principles they believed would guide their people towards heaven or a better rebirth. She recounts how small communities and councils, from the mountains of Dagestan to the hills of northern Africa, have created laws too, drafting constitutions to map out their boundaries and enforce moral behaviour. The work of powerful and learned law-makers is documented in legal texts recovered from water-logged graves, inscribed onto precious parchment, and passed down orally by generations of scholars. But chronicles, journals, and travellers' tales recount the stories of ordinary folk-Tibetan tribesmen, Icelandic farmers, and Jewish merchants-who also sought to define themselves and pursue their goals through laws. The variety of the world's laws, Pirie demonstrates, has been almost as great as the variety of its societies. Today, laws that developed out of muddled principles and procedures in Western Europe seem to dominate a globe divided tidily into nation-states. But below the surface a more complicated legal reality persists, one that is evident everywhere from the influence of Islamic law across the Middle East, to the persistence of traditional laws among nomadic Tibetan yak herders, to the unwritten rules of street gangs. What truly unites human beings, The Rule of Laws shows, is not a single sort of legal system, but our very faith that laws can turn our chaotic and imperfect worlds into just and ordered societies"--Provided by publisher.