A. D. E . Lewis – författare

This volume explores the way in which law integrated with other aspects of life in ancient Greece. The papers collected here reveal a number of different pathways between law and political, social, and economic life in Greek societies. Emanating from several scholarly traditions, they offer a range of contrasting but complementary insights rarely collected together. What emerges clearly is that law in Greece only takes on its full meaning in a broadly political context. Dynamic tensions govern the relationships between this semi-autonomous legal arena and other spheres of life. An ideology of equality before the law was juxtaposed with a practical reality of individuals' unequal abilities to cope with it. It is hard to draw firm lines between the settlement of cases in court and the spill-over of legal actions into the agora, the streets, the fields, and the houses. Hence it is hardly surprising if justice can all too easily give way to justification.

In The Roman Law Tradition an international team of distinguished legal scholars explores the various ways in which Roman law has affected and continues to affect patterns of legal decision-making throughout the world. Roman Law began as the local law of a small Italian city. It grew to dominate the legal relationships of the Mediterranean basin for the first five hundred years of our era. The revival of its study in the medieval universities led to its influencing the subsequent development of the legal system of western Europe and thereafter those parts of the rest of the World colonized from Europe. Roman legal ideas penetrated procedure as well as the substance of law and assisted the process of harmonization and codification of local customary laws. Techniques of legal reasoning which first emerge in Rome continue in daily use. Roman law was also of immense significance in the emergence of modern political thought.