Jewish status as citizens of the Roman Empire since 212 CE devolved during the three centuries from Constantine to Heraklios through political, legal, religious, social, and economic restrictions and suffered from mob pressures resulting in periodic pogroms. A complex Christian program led and implemented a state policy to convert the Jews to the dominant Christian religion in order to achieve the eschaton via the return of the crucified messiah, whom the majority now worshipped as God incarnate.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

According to a tradition recorded by the second-century Christian writer Hegesippus, the grandsons of Jude, Jesus’ brother, were denounced to the Roman emperor Domitian (81–96) because they, like Jesus himself, were descendants of King David. Fearing a restoration of David’s kingdom, Domitian summoned Jesus’ relatives to his imperial court and interrogated them directly: “Domitian asked them if they were descended from David and they admitted it. Then he asked how much property and money they had, and they replied that they only had 9,000 denarii between them, half belonging to each. And this, they said, was not in the form of cash but the estimated value of only thirty-nine plethra of land, from which they paid taxes and supported themselves from their own labour.” Having seen their calloused hands for himself, Domitian proceeded to question the men about Christ and his kingdom, “its nature, origin, and time of appearance.

This chapter explores the concept of ‘entangled legalities’ in the context of pre-modern and (post-)modern localised legal orders: regional, imperial, national, international, transnational and postnational. The first section explores the juridification of the international legal sphere; it contrasts private international law approaches with postnational law approaches, exploring the ways in which the recent postnational shift from hierarchical to heterarchical governance structures in fact leads us back to fundamental questions first posed by (Classical) Roman law. The second section focuses on the striking predominance of ‘strong’ legal norms in current analyses of transnational and postnational legal entanglements. The third section, in contrast, argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis away from ‘strong’ legal norms towards a more explicit focus on the importance of strategic legal argumentation in the constructing localised legalities, via a case study of the multiple juris(dictional)-generative practices revealed in the record of a specific, sixth-century, Roman (Byzantine) dispute settlement: P. Petra IV.39.

This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

This chapter analyzes the gradual and escalating development of human rights and religious freedom protections over the past two millennia. The chapter surveys the discovery and accumulation of rights and liberties in biblical texts and their interpretations over the centuries; in classical Roman law and the medieval civil, canon, and common law sources that built on the Bible and Roman law; in the Protestant Reformation and the Protestant–Catholic conflicts and revolts that followed; in Enlightenment liberalism and modern constitutional reforms born of democratic revolution; and in twentieth-century international human rights documents beginning with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Setting up the more detailed studies that follow, the chapter identifies several essential and enduring questions about the intersections of religion, human rights and religious freedom that still confront states and churches today.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

The chapter explores the paradoxes of the abundant sources for the west, where only a limited proportion of the population understood the dominant written language of communication, Latin; and until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the reams of fiscal and judicial records which survive come mostly from a fairly narrow band of senior clerics. But the clergy were not monolithic, and their impact on the actual practice of governance varied north and south of the Alps. Much depended on the extent to which principles of Roman law and the habit of living in towns persisted. Yet there is striking consistency both in the prerequisite virtues of a ruler propounded by clerical writers and in the essentials of inauguration ritual. The law which a king swore to uphold at his coronation was not made at will: he was expected to govern consensually and heed good counsel. Who could give such counsel and what constituted reasonable constraints on the king’s volition changed over time. In some realms, assemblies developed the authority to approve taxes and become law-makers in the late middle ages: the monarch’s exercise of his authority was tempered by popular demand.

Chapter 6 circles back to the question of what we understand property rights to mean, earlier chapters having made a general case for property rights as a lens through which to study sovereignty and having addressed the question of who is the sovereign who holds those rights. The chapter looks at the roots of different aspects of contemporary sovereign rights in both Roman law and English contract law. It looks at what these different traditions of property have to say about sovereignty with respect to both domestic politics and international relations, and how they interact with other ideas that legitimate the modern state such as popular sovereignty and nationalism. It connects the Roman tradition with a national interest in autonomy, and the English tradition with a national interest in multilateralism. It highlights the conceptual tensions between these traditions as practiced in contemporary international relations.

This chapter considers Roman and canon law, the English common law tradition and French juristic thought. Roman and canon law jurisprudence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are taken together because fifteenth-century jurists tended to reiterate the works of fourteenth-century ones. The chapter considers whether jurists contributed to the early development of international law. The impact of humanism on law is also discussed – notably in the case of Lorenzo Valla's destruction of the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine. The English common law tradition is considered through the writings of Sir John Fortescue: notably his justifications of English kingship. The French juristic tradition is considered through its two most important theorists: Jean de Terrevermeille and Claude de Seyssel. Terrevermeille made the most detailed contributions to the notions of the mystical body of the kingdom ever put forward in the Middle Ages. Seyssel, through elaborating the three bridles on royal power (religion, justice and the police) justified an absolute monarchy limited by higher norms, a solution fundamental for centuries throughout the ancien régime

This chapter transports us to Hellenistic Rome, and to the issuance of a legal privilege from the Senate of Rome to the polis of Delphi. The chapter shows how empirical formality and substantive rationality in law came together to enable ancient legal documents to work as instruments of legal power. In seeing how Rome deployed instruments of legal power - legal privileges that performatively created and memoralized patronage relationships with subordinated peoples - to forge an empire, we see how instruments of legal power were used to create governing communities and zones of exclusivity in Mediterranean antiquity. We also see how zones of exclusivity granted to city-states like Delphi are analogous to the zones of exclusivity granted to modern corporations like Facebook, in the form of intellectual property.

Ideas and practices often perceived as modern carry a complex premodern history that cannot be excised from their present. This is certainly the case of trade embargoes as economic means for the attainment of political goals. For a variety of reasons, however, tracing change over long periods of time remains an exercise in chronological and spatial jurisdiction. Further complicating our understanding of the convoluted relationship between past and present has been the increasingly pronounced tendency to write in the vein either of a “history of ideology” or, conversely, of a “history of action.” In fact, “theory” and “practice” existed in a dialectical relationship, a cyclical tug of war that produced not so much winners and losers as complex realities that require a thick reading of legal, political, cultural, and social change. This chapter, by contrast, seeks to explain the transfiguration of the legal tradition from the perspective of international law history by focusing on two interrelated transitions.

In 1756, George Harris, a civilian, member of the Doctors’ Commons and holder of numerous ecclesiastical offices, published the very first full English translation of Justinian’s Institutes. In every possible way, the publication was unique. First of all, Harris was not involved in academia. After graduation, he devoted himself to the practice of law. Second, the full translation of the Institutes was unprecedented in English history. Finally, Harris’s project reached much further than just to translate the ancient legal textbook into English. The main goal of Harris was to encourage young people to study their own, national legal system. How was it possible? Harris equipped his translation with numerous “notes” – short commentaries where he was explaining, interpreting and comparing Roman and English law. The main aim of the presented chapter is to evaluate the content of Harris’s translation as well as to appraise his scholarship and knowledge regarding Roman and English legal literature.

Chapter 5 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was not only a means to disseminate Iberianized Catholicism or the “negotiated” political ideology of the Hispanic Monarchy, but also shaped the expression of local identities, including creole patriotism (patriotismo criollo) in New Spain. In particular, this chapter focuses on a little-known late humanist Latin oration delivered in 1745 at the Royal and Pontifical University in Mexico City, which represents the first “Mexican” reaction to the Bibliotheca Mexicana controversy, a transatlantic debate started by a prominent Spanish antiquarian Manuel Martí (1663–1737) who claimed that the New World was an intellectual desert. Foregrounding this largely unknown episode in the most important intellectual controversy of the eighteenth-century Iberian Atlantic allows us to interrogate how membership in the Iberian World was constructed, and in particular how local patriotisms interacted with larger Iberian political and cultural identities. In the end, it seems that the identity of so-called creoles (American-born Spaniards) was constructed within a larger pan-Hispanic and pan-Catholic identity centered on membership in the larger space of the Iberian World and the “Republic of Letters.”

Although Roman criminal law differentiated between male and female offenders, women were not necessarily treated more leniently than men. Female sexual crime especially could be prosecuted in a visible manner and punished severely. This chapter discusses late antique families’ strategies for evading potentially humiliating public criminal process when it came to addressing the wrongdoing of female family members. Always a possibility in the accusatory criminal system of the Roman world, these strategies of evasion became increasingly formalised during late antiquity with the rise of ecclesiastical mediation. Such extrajudicial redress could result in women’s domestic seclusion. Towards the end of antiquity, female confinement was moved from the extrajudicial to the judicial sphere, with the introduction of the penalty of forced residence in a monastery. While forced residence in a monastery was seen as applicable to both male and female offenders, when applied to women it eased the pressures exerted by Roman law’s interference with intimate family affairs. In this way, the monastery became a locus of intersection between small-scale household-based and large-scale state acts of social control.

In Encomium in xl martyres ii, Gregory of Nyssa relates a violent biographical incident that was life changing. When Gregory was an adolescent, his mother, Emmelia, commissioned the building of a martyrium in Ibora, for the Forty Martyrs. Emmelia asked Gregory to accompany her to the inaugural festival. Gregory went grudgingly. Once there, his lax behaviour earned him a visit from the Forty Martyrs, during which they beat him. This chapter examines the violent episode from three perspectives. First is the discussion of what ‘acceptable’ violence is within the household of an elite Cappadocian family in the fourth century. Late Roman family law informs an examination of the tension and resolution between Emmelia and Gregory, as mother and son. Next, what valence Gregory gives this traumatic event is explored with regard to his familial history. Both were extremely important to Gregory and inextricably bound up with the Forty Martyrs. The chapter ends with an analysis of the startling ways Gregory employs the beating in the sermon, both to reify his family as kin to the martyrs, and to promote imitation of the martyrs among the faithful. The particular consequences of family violence upon Gregory as an elite Cappadocian Christian thus unfold.

In this chapter, I argue that the conversion of modern law into scientific state-centered law went hand in hand with the conversion of modern science into a hegemonic rationality and a central productive force. I concentrate in the gradual process whereby modern law came to be dominated by science and the state. I claim that in this process law lost sight of the tension between social regulation and social emancipation that was imprinted in its roots in the paradigm of modernity. The loss was so thorough and irreversible that the recovery of the emancipatory energies called for in this book must involve a radical unthinking of modern law. The first section analyzes the original imprint of the tension between regulation and emancipation in modern law, selecting three of its major moments: the reception of the Roman law, the rationalist natural law, and the theories of the social contract. In the second section, I analyze the historical process by which this tension was eliminated by the collapse of emancipation into regulation, distinguishing among three periods of capitalist development: liberal capitalism, organized capitalism, and disorganized capitalism. Finally, I state the major topics for the unthinking of law in the transition between social paradigms.

In view of seventeenth-century Protestant humanist transformations, this concluding chapter returns to the Spanish Dominicans and their scholastic-juristic view on the law of nations as a normative resource for thinking about international society. Their Thomistic attention to the rationality of the universal law of nations as positive human law enabled political recognition of non-European polities, the lawful occupants of the Indies. This contrasted with an imperial-humanist jurisprudence that provincialized natural law and the law of nations under European civilizational hierarchy to justify dispossession of inferior peoples. The chapter especially charts the evolution of Las Casas’s thinking through his interaction with the theologians at Salamanca. His eclectic synthesis of Thomistic theology, canon law, Roman law, and humanism to buttress indigenous occupation exemplified a radical scholastic brand of legal humanism that complicates static ideological categories in the history of international legal thought. By placing Las Casas in conversation with his Dominican confreres, a normative view of the law of nations grounded in Christian theological convictions emerges. It accounts for the independence and interdependence of all peoples, and the indispensable role of justice and solidarity in promoting world order under a Christian ethic of loving one’s neighbors.