The relation between the opening section of Plato’s Laws and Xenophon’s Constitution of the Lacedaemonians usually goes unnoticed. I draw attention to its importance for understanding Plato’s project in the dialogue. Section 1 shows that the view proposed by Plato’s Athenian Visitor that Lycurgus made virtue in its entirety the goal of his statecraft was anticipated in Xenophon’s treatise. It has to be treated as an interpretation of the Spartan politeia alternative to that advanced by the Athenian’s interlocutors, which Plato could hope to be taken seriously as such. The second section focuses on the legislative programme the Athenian says he had hoped to hear ascribed to the Cretan and Spartan lawgivers. Plato can expect recognition by the reader that the programme is properly Spartan and Cretan by virtue of its echoes of the programme attributed to Lycurgus by Xenophon. The third section argues that in making law primarily concerned with fostering the proper development, conduct, and treatment of human beings at every stage of the life cycle, above all by provision for sound customary practices and the like, Plato adopts the approach to law making taken by Xenophon’s Lycurgus.

Chapter six opens onto a tense confrontation that led the Spanish colonies in the New Kingdom the edge of civil war. As the colonial ideal of two ethnically-pure “republics” for Spaniards and for Indians had already begun to fracture, two indigenous communities identified the mestizo (mixed-ethnicity) sons of indigenous noblewomen as rightful successors to their outgoing caciques (indigenous chieftains). This decision inadvertently set off a chain of events that led to two decades of legal and political challenges. Through analysis of a cluster of legal cases involving aspiring caciques who were legitimate mestizo inheritors according to indigenous custom, this chapter explores the different bodies of law that informed Crown magistrates and administrators as they divided human communities and assigned their human subjects to categories and spaces. Here I also pay close attention to the legal implications of the rhetoric employed by different social factions as the legal cases in the colonies made their way to the Council of the Indies in Spain.

Quentin Skinner offers a powerful new interpretation of Hobbes’ understanding of time, and its implications for Christian belief and for politics. For Hobbes time is merely a subjective experience of continual succession. It follows that the Christian view of eternity as a state of timelessness must be a mistake, since there can be no such state. A further consequence is that the orthodox view of the Last Judgement must likewise be mistaken. It makes no sense to think of the saved living timelessly in heaven after the Second Coming; the only possibility is that they will live endlessly on earth. Hobbes also explores two political implications of his understanding of time. One is that, if time is mere succession, it cannot have any normative significance. The Common Law view that custom can make law is thus put in question. Hobbes also discounts the political significance of learning how to act with timeliness, offering instead a view of statecraft as a matter of following rules. The chapter ends by asking whether Hobbes succeeds in presenting a coherent criticism of the view – prominent in classical and Renaissance thought – that in politics it is essential to learn how to seize opportunities.

George Garnett explores the roles of time and history in English Common Law, and how they gave the Common Law its political salience. He begins by picking apart F.W. Maitland’s celebrated contrast between the ‘logic of evidence’, deemed to be characteristic of historical understanding, and the ‘logic of authority’, deemed to be characteristic of legal understanding. Celebrated as this statement has been, Garnett contends that the almost – but crucially not quite – antithetical relationship has never been properly understood, and that it rests in part on Maitland’s misunderstanding of how legal development and continuity worked in the period before judicial precedent became central, in the late sixteenth century. The chapter is therefore concerned both with Maitland and with the peculiar problems encountered in tracing legal development and continuity in a system which was primarily customary rather than statutory. By extension, Garnett considers the implications for explaining the use of English legal history in political thinking, particularly in the seventeenth century. Emphasis is laid on Maitland’s distaste for Sir Edward Coke, then as now, the most influential Common Law jurist.

The Introduction outlines how a modern notion of fashion helped to transform the novel and its representations of social change and individual and collective life in nineteenth-century Britain. The study contends that nineteenth-century novelists found in fashion a temporal model for conceptualizing a heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence that produced it. The Introduction traces fashion’s transformations back to the consumer revolution and new media of the eighteenth century, and shows how fashion’s integration with visual culture in the nineteenth century led to a new consciousness of visibility and celebrity. The Introduction develops a theoretical framework for analyzing fashion’s relationship to history and the present, and its unique role in stitching individual identity and self-expression to social and public life. Taking its cue from novels that engaged with the temporality of fashion, the Introduction also provides a revisionist account of the history of the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The starting point for discussion and analysis of the sources of international law is almost invariably art 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (‘ICJ Statute’), the International Court of Justice being the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. Article 38 lists the sources of international law as comprising treaties, custom, general principles of law, and – as subsidiary means for determining the law – judicial decisions and academic writing. However, in the 75 years since the adoption of the ICJ Statute, newer sources of legal obligation have emerged for the international community. These often involve non-state and intergovernmental actors in their creation. This chapter explores both the traditional and newer sources of international law and assesses how they are adopted and created.

When Hamlet instructs Gertrude to “assume a virtue if you have it not,” since “use almost can change the stamp of nature,” his counsel echoes Aristotelian ethical concepts such as “nature” and “habit” (hexis). Those concepts supplied terms used in English Protestant pastoral guidance but took on new freight given Reformation revaluations of human effort. By 1600, religious concerns – the fallen person’s capacity to perform virtuous acts, the relationship between inward disposition and outward appearance – put pressure on Aristotelian ideas. Protestant clergy rejected Aristotle’s teaching on habit because it made virtue the result of human effort and yet their recommendations for devotional practice called for the cultivation of dispositional habits in all but name. While habit as formation of character finds little representation on stage, since drama rarely shows the slow formation of character, Hamlet’s preoccupation with custom allows us to listen in on someone thinking about what the springs of action and change are, in terms fully alive to the public discourse of late Elizabethan England, and the pastoral inflection he places on hexis shows us how an inherited ethical idea can take on a fresh livery in Shakespeare’s plays.

What is international law, and how is it different from domestic (national) law?  This chapter provides an answer to those questions and introduces other foundational concepts in international law such as opinio juris, sovereignty, and the state. We trace the development of international law from Western/European perspectives and discuss how international law was often experienced as oppression and violence in the non-Western world. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the classic sources of international law: customs, treaties, general principles of law, judicial decisions, and scholarly writings, each of which is presented in some detail.

This book tells the story of the formation of a new field of knowledge. It shows how various authors combined their knowledge, experience, and critical thought to write lawbooks that made various disparate customs into a field of knowledge known as customary law. These authors wrote texts, known as the coutumiers in the French legal tradition, in thirteenth-century northern France. ‘Customary law’ typically refers to a type of rule made in practice, and in the courts, by the community, which can include ‘the people’ in some form, lords and kings, or lawyers and judges. Customs concerning specific rules of property, succession, and other subjects certainly emerged out of this oral practice. Coutumier authors, however, successfully crafted customary law into an expository genre of writing, one that took ideas of custom from practical experience and different forms of book learning and transformed them into bodies of customary law.

Unwritten law, or ius non scriptum, was a prominent definition of custom in the later medieval period developed especially in learned circles. Though ‘written custom’ should be a contradiction, this was unevenly perceived. Unlike the authors of the Glanvill and Bracton lawbooks in England, the coutumier authors did not seek to understand or legitimate their writing of custom within this learned framework. Those coutumier authors who addressed the question of writenness viewed the idea of ‘written custom’ as unproblematic. Instead, they saw writtenness and its lack through a practical lens, as an aspect of custom’s potential to be retained in memory. This does not mean they viewed written custom as ‘fixed’. Writing in a time of fundamental legal change, they understood that even the custom expressed in written text was mutable. While writing custom could help to keep it memory, it was potentially changeable in future versions of the text.

Throughout human history, societies have had to solve three economic problems. The first is to ensure that enough goods are produced. The second is that enough of the right goods are produced. The third is that these things are distributed fairly to everyone. The first two are problems of production and the third is a problem of distribution.

How did societies in the distant past solve the problems of production and distribution? John Hicks, in A Theory of Economic History, proposes three ways humans have done so. The first is through custom (sometimes also known as tradition). Imagine a San hunter-gatherer or Nguni farmer: the decision about what to produce and how to distribute that production was almost entirely determined by beliefs or customs that had been handed down from generation to generation. Tasks and occupations, titles and hierarchies were inherited.

This chapter begins by explaining why international lawyers typically begin discussions about the sources of public international law by referencing Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It then introduces treaties and custom, which are the two main sources of law in this field, before discussing other sources, namely general principles of law, decisions of international organizations, unilateral declarations, as well as judicial decisions and the teachings of international legal experts. The chapter ends with a discussion of non-binding instruments, which do not contain binding legal rules, but are nonetheless significant in the international legal field, as they contain norms that impact the behavior of states.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, as Cuba was gearing up to become one of the world’s largest sugar producer for the world markets, planters and colonial officials in Havana were rolling back many historic protections for smallholders, enslaved people, and free people of African descent, prudential measures that the Crown had historically encouraged as a means of “keeping the peace.” Yet, in Santiago, in the island’s east, many such measures remained in place, and the new coercive policies received a locally specific interpretation inside first-instance district courts. The demographic weight of the free population of African descent and its importance to the economy meant that officials could not rely on coercion alone to control them. Historically, it had been through custom that Santiago’s Afro-descendants had managed their relations with state authorities and with local enslavers and landholders. In an Age of Revolutions, at a time of profound shifts across the Caribbean, they maintained their ground as well as access to custom-based legal protections, even while their Havana counterparts saw theirs besieged on an unprecedented scale.

The history of medieval Church law has been written largely from the perspective of the ius commune. Following in the footsteps of Gratian, modern scholars have focused their attention first and foremost on ecclesiastical law as a learned and universal phenomenon, privileging the development of canonistic doctrine grounded in papal decretals and the statutes of general councils and taught in the emerging schools of the Latin West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet, as jurists of the “classical period” themselves recognized, the picture of canon law in the high Middle Ages would be incomplete without a consideration of its production and reproduction at a regional and local level. In provinces, dioceses, and parishes, people might of course have gained an understanding of canonical legislation and jurisprudence from such seminal texts as Gratian’s Decretum, the so-called Quinque compilationes antiquae, and the Liber extra, but one should be careful not to overestimate the impact of these works. Though attested to in an impressive number of manuscripts and of undeniably great influence, their distribution was nonetheless spotty and they were surely not on the shelves of all medieval churchmen, including many of those wielding ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Chapter 6 looks at the long afterlife of apprenticeship, examining women’s claims to become free and the ways in which they met, and did not meet, the demands of City custom. As with indentures, the paperwork of petitions shows marriage undercutting women’s entitlements; a maze of customary rights blocked women from enjoying the freedom unconditionally. At the same time, in practice the City accepted humble petitions, took fees and granted ‘small shops’ to women who could prove their connections to companies. Women’s place in the City was significant and rooted in tradition and daily practice, but contingent.

Chapter 5 focusses on the gendered history of the Copperbelt. It explains the centrality of female migration to the region, explores the roles imposed on women by companies and policy-makers as housewives and makers of ‘modern’ nuclear families and analyses the actual economic and social activity of women in Copperbelt society. The chapter shows how official anxiety about custom, marriage and female sexuality led to sustained social welfare intervention by mine companies and states. It equally demonstrates how African women and men themselves sought to make urban marriages and families and how they understood the changing nature of family life. The chapter explains how social historians highlighted the role of Zambian ‘women as workers’ and Congolese ‘women as wives’ and, using interviews, contrasts this to a sustained analysis of ‘women’s work’ encompassing housework, farming, trading and (occasionally) paid employment. Using interviews with community development officers, it also explains how post-independence mine companies managed familial and social conflict in mine townships and the understandings of family, production and custom that underwrote them.