Last modified: 23 Jul 2024 11:10
This course presents legal history over several millennia and from many different original cultures. This course carries the student through a legal adventure, exploring a wide range of legal systems around the globe and throughout human history.
The course covers the origins of law from Africa, South Asia, East Asia and beyond. From those beginnings, it traces how legal cultures emerged, evolved, or transformed. The course will explore the interplay of law and religion over the centuries. The goal of the course is to enable students to become aware of the wonderful diversity of legal systems before the Era of Exploration.
| Study Type | Undergraduate | Level | 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Term | First Term | Credit Points | 15 credits (7.5 ECTS credits) |
| Campus | Aberdeen | Sustained Study | No |
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The course begins at the observable beginning of self-documented legal culture, looking to initial literary sources in multiple cultures from Egypt, Mesopotamia, South Asia, and in East Asia. From that point forward, the course tracks the evolution and changes in legal systems rolling forward up to the moment when European nations began their “age of exploration” and its subsequent periods of colonialization across Africa, Asia, and the New World north and south. This is a course that celebrates the wide variety of legal systems and legal philosophies that existed before that point in time; the course respects and honours all of those legal cultures.
As such, students will encounter many diverse legal systems before those legal systems commingled in various ways with the legal systems that existed in Europe during the ‘Age of Exploration’, raising student awareness of the richer legal history of the world and ensuring that students appreciate a broad range of legal systems outside of the European legal complex.
Sometimes legal trails continue to the modern era, other times they vanish; but the richness and diversity of human legal system and legal cultures is rarely taught from a fully global perspective. This course endeavours to remind students that law and legal cultures arise everywhere and in all settings; that law is a technology and ritual that every culture discovers, creates, and makes their own. This course will awaken students to seeing how law and legal institutions can work in ways not imagined or practiced in European legal cultures, and it will remind them of the wonder and authority that these diverse legal cultures played for each society throughout history.
This course will also include legal cultures that are closely affiliated with major religions, enabling students to understand how some legal cultures have preserved their religious values within their legal cultures. Islamic legal thought, Christian legal thought, Buddhist legal thought, Vedic legal thought, and broader schools of ethical legal visions from Southeast Asia and East Asia will be included in the course, while being fully respectful of those systems of thought, recognizing that many of our students (and lecturers too!) will hail from those communities.
This course does not only examine non-European legal cultures, for it will also investigate a variety of abandoned European legal systems, from bronze age Greek legal culture to non-Roman legal cultures operating in Europe before the emergence of broader ius commune, such as the Salic Codes of the Franks. Even Europe once had greater legal diversity than it does today and there are lost legal traditions as certain ‘legal culture winners’ emerged.
Roman legal culture will be examined to reflect on its commonalities and differences with other historical legal cultures and to examine its connections to other legal cultures, notably with ancient Egyptian law and with Sumerian law.
Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.
| Assessment Type | Summative | Weighting | 40 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assessment Weeks | 11,12 | Feedback Weeks | 14,15 | |
| Feedback |
Primarily, the essays will be graded on their rigor of engagement with the original legal materials, on the analysis applied to the legal materials and their contextual settings, and to the quality of the essay’s structure and narrative. |
Word Count | 1000 | |
| Knowledge Level | Thinking Skill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Conceptual | Understand | To understand why each legal system emerged as it did, why it functioned as it did, and how each system supported the legal narratives and principles of justices, as expressed within each culture. |
| Factual | Remember | The first ILO focuses on learning about the many diverse legal systems that existed before 1500 CE. To know when, where, and the many whats of each legal system. |
| Assessment Type | Summative | Weighting | 60 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assessment Weeks | Feedback Weeks | |||
| Feedback |
Feedback will be provided in a written/text-based format. Opportunities to meet with teachers online to be provided via Teams should students request additional support on feedback. |
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| Knowledge Level | Thinking Skill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Conceptual | Understand | To understand why each legal system emerged as it did, why it functioned as it did, and how each system supported the legal narratives and principles of justices, as expressed within each culture. |
| Reflection | Analyse | To begin their examination, investigation, and their own sense of classifications of how different legal systems responded to different cultural values and challenges. |
There are no assessments for this course.
| Assessment Type | Summative | Weighting | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Assessment Weeks | Feedback Weeks | |||
| Feedback | ||||
| Knowledge Level | Thinking Skill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
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| Knowledge Level | Thinking Skill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Conceptual | Understand | To understand why each legal system emerged as it did, why it functioned as it did, and how each system supported the legal narratives and principles of justices, as expressed within each culture. |
| Reflection | Analyse | To begin their examination, investigation, and their own sense of classifications of how different legal systems responded to different cultural values and challenges. |
| Factual | Remember | The first ILO focuses on learning about the many diverse legal systems that existed before 1500 CE. To know when, where, and the many whats of each legal system. |
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