Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-14T05:30:30.910Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - The Reasonable Person in the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2024

Valentin Jeutner
Affiliation:
Lunds Universitet, Sweden
Get access

Summary

This chapter explains that the reasonable person was not the first anthropomorphised legal standard. The idea of model characters can be traced back to the oldest documents of humanity. The chapter introduces three of these ancient ancestors of the reasonable person: the silent person of Egypt (geru maa), the earnest person of Greece (ho spoudaios), and the male head of a family in ancient Rome (paterfamilias). There are many other ancestors of the reasonable person, and at least implicit anthropomorphised standards of behaviour could probably be found in any society at any time. The three concepts here are presented only as examples, and because they form part of one Mediterranean context in which the ancient Egyptians probably influenced the ancient Greeks, who in turn influenced the Romans, whose influence on contemporary European law and on the systems derived from it can still be felt. Each of the three figures introduced in this chapter deserves its own biography and the analysis offered here remains fragmented. Nonetheless, the selected aspects of the lives of the geru maa, of the spoudaios, and of paterfamilias foreshadow many of the questions, tensions, and challenges with which the common law’s reasonable person still struggles today.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Reasonable Person
A Legal Biography
, pp. 13 - 32
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×