Tradition!
This is the oldest form of legal tradition, characterized by its reliance on orality and memory for its preservation:
What is chthonic law?
Inscribed in 451-450 BCE, these tablets marked a new approach to law and served as a template for the Roman legal system through its polity as a republic and an empire:
What are the Twelve Tables?
In 1550, this influential Spanish lawyer debated Bartolomeu de las Casas in Valladolid, and posited the "natural inferiority" of the Native Americans as a justification for the Spanish conquest of the Americas:
Who is Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda?
This 1689 document specified certain rights that the monarch could not abrogate without losing the right to rule, that the powers of the monarch are limited by law and constitution, and elevated the written constitution as the highest form of law:
What is the English Bill of Rights?
This word derived from both Greek and Latin roots literally means "people/group killing" but also conveys a distinct cultural motivation for violence:
What is genocide?
The words Halakah and Shariah translate into this English phrase:
What is the Way (or the Path)?
Translated as the "law of nations," this Latin phrase refers to law based on "natural reason" that should govern interaction between sovereign peoples in diplomacy, trade, and war:
What is ius gentium?
This legal concept with Roman origins refers to the cases in which war was legal.
This idea, grounded in “outsider legal scholarship” identifies the ways in which racism is structurally embedded within society:
What is Critical Race Theory?
Since the 18th century, there have been over 100 international treatises aimed at abolishing this exploitative practice:
What is slavery?
These poems contain the founding mythos and natural law of Hindu society, along with a priestly code regulating the aspects of daily life and a rich oral tradition:
What are the Vedas?
What is a jurist?
This concept challenged the idea that the Church should have total authority and emphasized a study of classical sources of knowledge:
What is humanism?
This foundational legal document went further than the English Bill of Rights by declaring that when the consent of the governed is violated, natural rights provide not only the justification to “restore” ancient principles, but to create something entirely new:
What is the Declaration of Independence?
During the Cold War, both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. frequently invoked this legal concept in their foreign policy, even when not acting in good faith to uphold these around the globe or at home:
What are human rights?
This supposedly universal legal system, which became extremely important to the French Revolution, developed out of ius gentium, Christian cannon law, and classical philosophy.
What is natural law?
This movement not only pitted the power of monarchies against the Roman Church, but also critiqued the Church as an institution not worthy of secular or divine authority:
What is the Reformation?
This term refers to a geographic conception of the economic system that developed between the Americas, Europe, and Africa in the early modern era:
What is the Atlantic World?
This concept refers to the existence of two or more legal systems with a socio-political framework:
What is legal pluralism?
This concept promises "inclusivity" but tends to reinforce an hierarchical distribution of power between groups within a society:
What is tolerance?
This 1868 political event set the stage for the modernization of Japanese law and society by consolidating power under the Emperor:
What is the Meiji Restoration?
This phrase drawn from religious text provided cultural justification for separate domains of authority between sovereign/state law and ecclesiastical law in medieval Europe:
What is "render unto Caesar"?
In response to criticism that they were not waging a legal war on the Native Americans, the Spanish required their armies to read out this proclamation before attack them.
What is El Requerimiento?
In Prof. Baumgartner’s lecture, she argued that the Roberts and Pindall cases against the Boston School District was an early example of this discriminatory American legal tradition:
What is "separate but equal"?
The Preamble to this 1945 document proclaims its purpose as "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small..."
What is the Charter of the United Nations?