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The Political Functions of (Premodern) Courts and Procedure and Questions of Comparative Method

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2019

Amalia D. Kessler
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Abstract

Orit Malka's Disqualified Witnesses, Between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law is structured around a puzzle. Why did the rabbinic literature produced in Roman Palestine in the early centuries of the Common Era identify a list of four seemingly disparate types of people—dice-players, usurers, pigeon-flyers, and traders in Seventh Year produce—as disqualified from giving testimony in court? This argument has important implications, I suggest, for all legal systems—like most throughout history—that are not structured around a modern, positivist conception of law and of the role of courts.

Type
Invited Article
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 937 - 946
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2019 

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Footnotes

She thanks Yoni Pomeranz for helpful and interesting conversations about Jewish law.

References

1. Malka, Orit, “Disqualified Witnesses between Tannaitic Halakha and Roman Law: The Archeology of a Legal Institution,” Law and History Review 37 (2019): 907Google Scholar, 935.

2. Ibid., 935–36.

3. See, for example, Langbein, John H., Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 55–56Google Scholar, 76–77; and Fisher, George, “The Jury's Rise as Lie Detector,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1997): 585–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Hirschl, Ran, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and the Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

5. Kessler, Amalia D., Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 151–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. van Caenegem, Raoul, “History of European Civil Procedure,” in International Encyclopedia of Comparative Law, vol. XVI (Civil Procedure), ed. Cappelletti, Mauro (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1987), 19–20Google Scholar; and Damaška, Mirjan, Evaluation of Evidence: Pre-Modern and Modern Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 34–35Google Scholar.

7. van Caenegem, “History of European Civil Procedure,” 20.

8. Damaška, Evaluation of Evidence 93–97.

9. Ibid., 118–19.

10. Ibid., 61–62.

11. See, for example, Shapiro, Barbara J., Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Probable Cause: Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3Google Scholar.

12. Dawson, John P., A History of Lay Judges (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Royer, Jean-Pierrre, Histoire de la justice en France de la monarchie absolue à la République (Paris: Pressses Universitaires de France, 1995), 207–27Google Scholar.

13. Goldsmith, James Lowth, Lordship in France, 1500–1789 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 56–58Google Scholar; and Hayhoe, Jeremy, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 72–83Google Scholar.

14. See, for example, Collins, James B., The State in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xxiv, 34–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 260; and Luebke, David M., “Ceremony and Dissent: Religion, Procedural Conflicts, and the ‘Fiction of Consensus’ in Seventeenth-Century Germany,” in The Holy Roman Empire, Reconsidered, ed. Coy, Jason Philip, Marschke, Benjamin, and Sabean, David Warren (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 151–53Google Scholar.

15. See, for example, Kessler, Amalia D., A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 247–55Google Scholar; and Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, The Emperor's Old Clothes: Constitutional History and the Symbolic Language of the Holy Roman Empire, trans. Dunlap, Thomas (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 30–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Malka, “Disqualified Witnesses,” 935–36.

17. Ibid., 935 n. 127.

18. Ibid., 907.

19. Ibid., 906.

20. See, for example, Teubner, Gunther, “Legal Irritants: Good Faith in British Law or How Unifying Law Ends Up in New Divergences,” The Modern Law Review 61 (January 1998): 11–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Langer, Máximo, “From Legal Transplants to Legal Translations: The Globalization of Plea Bargaining and the Americanization Thesis in Criminal Procedure,” Harvard International Law Journal 45 (2004): 29–35Google Scholar.

21. Malka, “Disqualified Witnesses,” 922.

22. Ibid., 922 n. 69.

23. Ibid., 922 n. 70.

24. Interestingly, according to David Weiss Halivni, the rabbis transmitted laws from one generation to the next on the precise understanding that it was for future generations to identify reasons for the laws created by their predecessors.  Halivni, David Weiss, The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud, trans. Rubsenstein, Jeffrey L. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.  I thank Yoni Pomeranz for pointing me to this argument.

25. Cohen, Shaye J. D., From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 138–39Google Scholar.

26. Malka, “Disqualified Witnesses,” 906 n. 9.

27. Ibid., 906 n. 9.

28. Ibid., 936.