By Custom And By Law

A central puzzle in jurisprudence has been the role of custom in law. Custom is simply the practices and usages of distinctive communities. But are such customs legally binding? Can custom be law, even before it is recognized by authoritative legislation or precedent? And, assuming that custom is a source of law, what are its constituent elements? Is proof of a consistent and long-standing practice sufficient, or must there be an extra ingredient - that the usage is pursued out of a sense of legal obligation, or, at least, that the custom is reasonable and efficacious? And, most tantalizing of all, is custom a source of law that we should embrace in modern, sophisticated legal systems, or is the notion of law from below outdated, or even dangerous, today? This volume answers these questions through a rigorous multidisciplinary, historical, and comparative approach, offering a fresh perspective on custom's enduring place in both domestic and international law.

A comprehensive and wide-ranging account of the interrelationship between law and literature in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Tudor England.

History has largely forgotten the writings, both public and private, of early nineteenth-century America’s legal scholars. However, Ellen Holmes Pearson argues that the observers from this era had a unique perspective on the young nation and the directions in which its legal culture might go. Remaking Custom draws on the law lectures, treatises, speeches, and papers of the early republic’s legal scholars to examine the critical role that they played in the formation of American identities. As intermediaries between the founders of America’s newly independent polities and the next generation of legal practitioners and political leaders, the nation’s law educators expressed pride in the retention of the "republican parts" of England’s common law while at the same time identifying some of the central features that distinguished American law from that of Britain. From their perspective, the new nation’s blending of tradition and innovation produced a superior national character. Because American law educators interpreted both local and national legal trends, Remaking Custom reveals how national identities developed through Americans’ articulation of their local customs and identities. Pearson examines the innovations that legists could celebrate, such as constitutional changes that placed the people at the center of their governments and more egalitarian property laws that accompanied America’s abundant supply of land. The book also deals with innovations that presented uncomfortable challenges to law educators as they sought creative ways to justify the legal cultures that grew up around slavery and Anglo-Americans’ hunger for land occupied by Native Americans.

The author believed that the subject had not been specially dealt with in the past, & thus chose to write this work in an effort to present the subject in what he considered the proper way, as opposed to the improper references made to it in previous works by such people as Sir Henry Maine.

Custom, Law, and Monarchy explores how law evolved in early modern France, from an amalgam of customs, Roman and canon law, royal edicts, and judicial decisions, to the unified Civil Code of 1804. In exploring the history of this codification of law, Marie Seong-Hak Kim lays out a new way of understanding French history.

Drawing on extensive archival and library sources, Karsten explores these collisions and arrives at a number of conclusions that will surprise.

This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts. Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship. As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists.

The concept of customary international law, although differently formulated, is already present in early modern European debates on natural law and the law of nations. However, no scholarly monograph has, until now, addressed the relationship between custom and the European natural law and ius gentium tradition. This book tells that neglected story, and offers a solid conceptual framework to contextualize and understand the 'problematic of custom', namely how to identify its normative content. Natural law doctrines, and the different ways in which they help construct human reason, provided custom with such normative content. This normative content consists of a set of fundamental moral values that help identify the status of custom as either a fundamental feature or an original source of ius gentium. This book explores what cultural values and practices facilitated the emergence of custom and rendered it into as a source of the law of nations, and how they did so. Two crucial issues form the core of the book's analysis. Firstly, it qualifies the nature of the interrelation between natural law and ius gentium, explaining why it matters in relation to our understanding of the idea of custom. Second, the book claims that the process of custom formation as a source of law calls into question the role of the authority of history. The interpretation of the past through this approach can thus be described as one of 'invention'.

Provides an in-depth study of the theory, history, practice, and interpretation of customary international law.

Sets forth the evolution of Korea's law and legal system from the Chosǒn dynasty through the colonial and postcolonial modern periods.