Legal uniformity (?...)

"A powerful society driven by ambition or economic necessity may conquer foreign lands or bring them under its suzerainty, and it may plant colonies abroad, settling its citizens on foreign shores. Conquest and suzerainty involve the imposition of an administrative apparatus on a society that until recently had its own laws. Depending on the mode of domination and the kind of extractive relation the dominant power has in mind, these laws may penetrate more or less deeply into the society being dominated, sometimes superseding local ways of doing things, sometimes supplementing them, sometimes just adding a veneer of conqueror's law over a thriving indigenous jurisprudence. As for colonial settlement, the colonists will expect to be able to bring with them many of their own customs and laws, at least for administration among themselves, but inevitably also in their dealings with the other inhabitants of the lands they are colonizing. None of this particularly creditable to the colonizing power, but it happens. And it is one of the prime ways in which common laws are disseminated in a region."

"Even when conquest is not at issue, societies may take pains to bring their laws into regularity with one another in customs leagues and economic alliances. The European Union began in this way, but there are many earlier antecedents: the Hanseatic League of the late medieval and early modern era is the best-known example. Legal uniformity in certain spheres may be the upshot of the activity of nonstate entities that live and work beyond the boundaries of any particular political society. Harold Berman gives a fine account in Law and Revolution of the way in which "the new canon law" and the administrative structure of the papal curia constituted the first modern Western legal system in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. The system he describes was neither a state system nor a system of international law. It just grew up as a cosmopolitan entity, based in what seemed to be the capital of the civilized world. As such, it provided not only, Berman argues, a model for the growth of national legal systems, but also something to which systems of law that had a more cosmopolitan mode could be anchored."

Τα αποσπάσματα είναι από:

Jeremy Waldron, "Partly Laws Common to All Mankind". Foreign Law in American Courts, Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 204-205.

Ένα εξαιρετικά πλούσιο και ενδιαφέρον βιβλίο - σε κάποια ζητήματα διαφωνώ, αλλά αυτό δεν αλλάζει την πολύ θετική μου άποψη.


Οι φωτογραφίες είναι από την Αρχαία Αγορά, Αθήνα