Book Extract: The Rule of Laws: A 4000-year Quest to Order the World by Fernanda Perie

Many other respected sets of laws have been highly impractical in quite puzzling ways, including those developed by the authors of the Old Testament. Although inspired by the Mesopotamian tradition, where law was the work of kings, the Israelite priests were pursuing a distinctly religious project.

Excerpted with permission from The Rule of Laws: A 4000-year Quest to Order the World by Fernanda Perie, published by Profile Books/ Hachette India.

THE EARLIEsT LAWs were little more than pragmatic and mundane rules. Ostensibly intended for rulers trying to manage complex societies, most addressed the sorts of tensions that arise anywhere people live together, the consequences of killings, injuries, theft, and adultery. They attempted to regulate property use and ownership, inheritance, family relations, and responsibility for children, as most laws have done throughout human history.

They dealt with the consequences of slavery, for long a wide-spread issue, and provided rules about using oaths and ordeals to resolve disputes of fact. Over the centuries, rulers found law a useful tool with which to manage their populations. Chinese emperors, Indian princes, and Islamic caliphs all conducted censuses, measured and mapped out fields and pastures, and used laws to categorize households, levy taxes, and raise armies. Village meetings and tribal councils also made constitutions to regulate social behaviour and resolve disputes.

But the aims of the first lawmakers were not just practical.The Mesopotamian kings wrapped their laws in grand statements about the social justice they were promising their people while also invoking the favour of the gods. The Chinese emperors claimed that, by enforcing their laws, they were maintaining the order of the cosmos. The Hindu brahmins explained that they were establishing rules to guide people according to the requirements of the dharma, the ideal order of the world.

Many other respected sets of laws have been highly impractical in quite puzzling ways, including those developed by the authors of the Old Testament. Although inspired by the Mesopotamian tradition, where law was the work of kings, the Israelite priests were pursuing a distinctly religious project.

The Pentateuch (or Torah), the first five books of the Bible, probably took the form we know today between the ninth and fifth centuries BCE.2 They describe how, after leading his people to safety, Moses gave them laws for worship, ritual, and sacrifice, along with an extremely complicated set of dietary rules.

These forbade Israelites from eating ‘abominable things’, that is, animals, fish, and birds that were unclean, creating a set of distinctions that have puzzled scholars ever since.

3 Greek philosophers wondered whether the rules had medicinal purposes, preventing Jews from eating unsafe meat. But why should health, or even taste, have required that the Israelites avoid chameleons, moles, crocodiles, and most locusts (though not all), and what could possibly have been wrong with hares? The great Jewish theologian Maimonides despaired of finding meaning in the laws, declaring that ‘those who trouble themselves to find a cause for any of these detailed rules are, to my eyes, devoid of sense’.

Others supposed that the laws were an amalgam of earlier rules, which originally had hygienic, aesthetic, or religious purposes, or even that they were simply a set of commands that required discipline, obedience, and unreflective rule-following on the part of pious Jews. But the authors of Leviticus were obviously keen to promote an orderly society, so why should they have produced such an illogical list?4 The answer must lie in the wider purposes of the laws. Many of them promoted physical perfection, so priests could not be disabled, for example.

And they demanded ritual purity. Jews had to eat, sleep, dress, and have sex in the right ways; warriors’ camps had to be set apart from the business of war, to avoid its polluting effects; and Jews were told they should not yoke together an ox and a donkey, or weave wool together with linen. This was to avoid confusing distinct categories.

The laws, that is, told Israelites how to live holy lives by creating an order of categories and separating the pure from the impure, in physical as well as spiritual terms.

This larger purpose of the Israelites’ laws sheds light on their distinctions between clean and unclean. The cattle, sheep, and goats that provided basic sustenance in the region were cloven-hoofed ungulates who chewed the cud, so the priests decided that these qualities should define the class of clean animals. As a result, it included some wild beasts, such as antelopes and wild goats, but not all domestic animals, most importantly pigs. They declared that fish without scales and fins were abominations, as were four-footed creatures that could fly, animals with hands that used them for walking, and anything that swarmed. To their minds, proper animals should walk, fish should swim, and birds should fly. Hopping was close enough to walking, so they declared that grasshoppers, crickets, and some locusts were clean. But swarming was not. Whatever the rationale behind their decisions, the rules were more important for what they symbolized, dividing pure from impure, than for the ways in which they might save Jews from unclean food.

And they set the Israelites apart from gentiles, as people who followed God’s laws. Behind them was a religious vision for a chosen people. Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, and Christian scholars all made detailed and extensive laws as they developed their traditions.

It is a consequence of the rift between church and state in medieval Europe that modern laws are considered to stand apart from religion. The distinction would have made little sense to the early lawmakers of the world’s major religions.

Other lawmakers, pursuing apparently political projects, have been inspired by grander civilizations, setting out visions of social order in sets of laws that seem equally impractical. In the seventh and eighth centuries cE, the Tibetans who inhabited the vast plateau west of China were still warlike tribesmen. Strong leaders brought them together in military expeditions to China and Central Asia, demanding oaths of loyalty, and the most successful eventually established themselves as kings.

A royal dynasty set up a court and a bureaucracy, with offices and ranks of ministers. Almost certainly inspired by the elaborate administration of the Chinese emperors, they also created laws. That we know anything of this period is largely thanks to documents crammed into a cave at Dunhuang, a trading post on a branch of the silk roads that ran north of Tibet, discovered by local scholars in 1900.

It had remained sealed since the eleventh century, and when the Hungarian explorer Aurel Stein arrived in 1907,he found almost forty thousand documents written in Chinese,Tibetan, and other Asian languages.5 Persuading the local scholars to give him access, he spent days leafing through the fragile scrolls by candlelight and lamplight; eventually he carried away caseloads of the most important documents, which he deposited in the museums of Paris and London. Within this treasure trove historians found some of the ancient Tibetan laws.

The laws now enforced throughout the world are almost all modelled on systems developed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. During two hundred years of colonial rule, Europeans exported their laws everywhere they could.

But they weren't filling a void: in many places, they displaced traditions that were already ancient when Vasco Da Gama first arrived in India. Even the Romans were inspired by earlier precedents.

Where, then, did it all begin? And what has law been and done over the course of human history? In The Rule of Laws, pioneering anthropologist Fernanda Pirie traces the development of the world's great legal systems — Chinese, Indian, Roman, and Islamic — and the innumerable smaller traditions they inspired. At the heart of the story is a paradox: how did the pronouncements of the powerful became a vital weapon in ordinary people's fight for justice?

Fascinating, insightful and gripping, The Rule of Laws provides a comprehensive exploration of the history underpinning our modern legal systems. A triumph -- The Secret Barrister

An ambitious account of the rise and fall of the world's great legal systems ... richly informative andconsistently thought-provoking .. Fernanda Pirie's work will command, and deserve, a wide readership-- Jonathan Sumption ― TLS

Exceptionally rich -- Andrew Stark ― Wall Street Journal The Rule of Laws offers a pathbreaking and stimulating account of how societies across different regions and epochs drew upon secular, sacred, and scholarly traditions to create laws that organized the lives of their citizens ... This expansive narrative challenges what we think we know about legal history and the assumptions we make about law's future -- Edward J. Watts, author ― Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

The Rule of Laws is a fascinating, comprehensive study that forces us to think again about what law is, and why it matters ... For those who want to understand why human society has emerged as it has, this is essential reading -- Rana Mitter, author ― China's Good War

In the exploration of Big questions concerning the law, legality, legal traditions and suchlike, [The Rule of Laws] will occupy an important position. It asks some fundamental questions, including where did the concept of law - and thence of the rule of law - originate? ... A vast canvas ... magisterial ― The Commonwealth Lawyer Agile [and] convincing ... A valuable study for students of the law and its evolution over the millennia ― Kirkus
In this panoramic history, Pirie tells the story of the rise and fall of systems of law across the civilizations, empires, and societies of the ancient and modern world ... Pirie argues that if the history of law has a common theme, it is that laws are not simply rules -- G. John Ikenberry ― Foreign Affairs

An intriguing synthesis of the history of global legal codes and their origins -- Jeffrey Meyer ― Library Journal

The Rule of Laws is a great overview of the history of law, covering four millennia and many different societies ... accessible to a wide readership. It dispels ideas that our current Western form of law is natural and by doing so, give us the liberty to question how it can be used or altered to make the world a better place. It also leaves us with the idea that it can be taken away ― Open Letters Review Excellent ... Pirie's writing is evocative throughout this superbly packaged history -- Nicholas Goodman ― Law Society Gazette

Professor Fernanda Pirie, Professor of the Anthropology of Law, St Cross College, University of Oxford is an anthropologist specialising in Tibetan societies. Prof. Pirie has used her research into legal practices and legal codes to develop the anthropology of law. Presented in The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013), her approach builds on themes and debated developed in the Legalism research group, which she convenes with colleagues in anthropology and history. It is the basis for continuing research in to Tibetan legal history, as well as related issues, such as comparison in law and anthropology and the relationship between empirical studies and legal theory. She has conducted her fieldwork in the mountains of Ladakh and the grasslands of eastern Tibet. She previously spent almost a year practicing as a barrister. She is currently working on Legal Ideology in Tibet: Politics, Practice, and Religion, an AHRC-funded project on the legal history of medieval Tibet.