1st Edition
Framing Devices and Global Legal Traditions From the Ancient World to the Modern Nation State
This collection explores prefaces, prologues, paratexts, and other types of framing devices. Across world history, these devices have introduced the law, articulated its context and audience, identified the basis of legal and moral authority, critiqued existing conditions, or even tried to “restore” something that never was. Scribes, lawmakers, and legal theorists also used frames to position the law in time and space, purporting to define populations and their identities. Despite the ubiquity and complexity of these phenomena, few studies have drawn out methods for studying their role in constructing, fortifying, or reimagining legal frameworks within legal cultures or traditions. This volume offers new ways to consider the significance of framing apparatuses regarding how and why they are created, remembered, forgotten, utilized, and recovered within legal traditions. The studies range from the ancient world to the modern nation-state system, aiming to explore the intersections and collisions between juridical and political interpretation practices.
The book will be of interest to academics and researchers in the areas of Legal History, Comparative Law, Legal Cultures and Traditions, Legal Theory, Jurisprudence, Constitutional Law and Legislative Drafting.
1. More than Marginal: The Complex Work of Framing Devices
Laura Culbertson and Susan Longfield Karr
Part 1: Pulling Together
2. The Preambles to Archaic Greek Interstate Treaties at Olympia: A Study in the Diffusion of Diplomatic Language
Nicholas D. Cross
3. Prefaces of Legal Documents in Late Imperial China
Frédéric Constant
4. The Conservative Case for Warrior Law: Legal Change in Medieval Japan
Christopher Bovbjerg
5. Bodies of Law in Early Medieval England and Scotland
Andrew Rabin
6. Preface to the Indian Penal Code, as Originally Drafted (October 1837)
Elizabeth Lhost
Part 2: Breaking Apart
7. (Re-)framing Hammurabi’s Laws: Worldbuilding with Prologues and Epilogues in the Ancient Near East
Laura Culbertson
8. Prefaces in the Legal Texts of the Crusader Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus
Adam M. Bishop
9. No Mere Metaphor: The State of Nature as Framing Device
Susan Longfield Karr
10. Jefferson's Preambles, Prefaces, and Persistence
Matthew Crow
11. Martens' Clause and Ambiguity at the Birth of Modern Humanitarian Law
Daimeon Shanks-Dumont
12. Searching for Meaning In the Utah Constitution's Free Market Preamble
Jorge Contreras
Biography
Laura Culbertson (PhD Michigan, Near Eastern Studies) is a professor of Middle East Studies at American Public University. Her background is in Ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology, and her recent research interests include slavery and ancient law. On the topic of slavery, she edited Slaves and Households in the Near East and co-edited Society and the Individual in Mesopotamia, which includes a contribution Mesopotamian slavery. Other recent publications discuss legal pluralism and the social contexts of Mesopotamian law.
Susan Longfield Karr (Ph.D. University of Chicago, History): Longfield Karr’s teaching and research focus on state- and empire-state formation and the emergence of the so-called modern rule of law within communities (constitutions) and between them (international law) from the late medieval through the early modern period. Her work pays particular attention to the meaning and significance of legal vocabularies within cultural, political, and juridical frameworks that accompany the history and development of rights (customary, civic, and natural) in the context of state and empire formation in Italy, Germany, France, and England. Most recently, she published On Justice and Right: Jus gentium in Humanist Jurisprudence, wherein she explored the transformation of fundamental categories of Roman law such as ius and ius gentium by the fathers of legal humanism, Guillaume Budé, Ulrich Zasius, and Andrea Alciati (Brill, 2022). Dr. Longfield Karr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.
