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universal community based on common faith rather than kin loyalties.
Common Law is called common because it is not particularistic. That is, the myriad customary rules that governed the different regions of England were replaced by a single Common Law, in which a precedent in one part of the realm was applicable to the rest of the kingdom
offenses that were previously compensated by the perpetrator’s kin group through a wergeld payment were now criminally prosecuted by a higher third party,
They are much less inclined to obey the law if they believe that it is unjust.
Religion was essential to the establishment of a normative legal order that was accepted by kings as well as by ordinary people.
Common Law
it would not have come into being in the first place, or been enforced, without a strong centralized state.
Catholic church’s declaration of independence from political authority came in the late eleventh century, led by a monk named Hildebrand
the church could not become independent of political authority unless it reformed itself, and the most important reform was to restrict the ability of priests and bishops to marry and have children.
As Gregory VII, he made celibacy of the priesthood official church doctrine and forced already married priests to choose between their duties to the church and their duties to their families.
to end corruption and rent seeking within the church by attacking the very source of patrimonialism, the ability of bishops and priests to have children.
the rediscovery of the Justinian Code, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, in a library in northern Italy
the Justinian Code remains the basis for the civil law tradition that is practiced throughout continental Europe and in other countries
a highly sophisticated compilation of Roman law produced in Constantinople
Thomas Aquinas,
instead to reason about the sources of law and how it was to be applied to novel situations.
rational inquiry into the meaning of those texts.
we are used to thinking of England and its offshoot the United States as the home of Anglo-Saxon laissez-faire economic liberalism, and France as the birthplace of dirigiste centralized government. Up through the fourteenth century, however, exactly the opposite was true.
higher law may be seen as rooted in timeless or universal principles,
most modern constitutions leave somewhat ambiguous the ultimate source of their legitimacy.
no English king ever believed that he was above the law could not be said of any Chinese emperor, who recognized no law other than those he himself made.
the specific institutional form that Western Christianity took, that determined its impact on later political development.
church as a whole never declared independence from the state.
the different components of modernization were not all part of a single package
Thus two of the basic institutions that became crucial to economic modernization—individual freedom of choice with regard to social and property relationships, and political rule limited by transparent and predictable law—were created by a premodern institution, the medieval church.
The Chinese state has never recognized a source of religious authority higher than itself and has easily controlled whatever priesthoods existed.
Westerners often think that the fusion of church and state is intrinsic to Islam while being foreign to Christian Europe, and that the kind of theocratic regime set up in Iran after the 1979 revolution somehow constitutes a reversion to a traditional form of Muslim rule. None of this is accurate.
Christianity,
Islam.
In both cases, law comes not from political power, as in China, but from God, who has dominion...
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No one, that is, ever established a single Muslim “church” comparable to the Catholic church that emerged after the Gregorian reform.
Mamluks and Turkish Janissaries got around these rules first by acquiring families, and then by establishing charitable foundations to be run by their children or other designees,
Ordinary tax rates were raised arbitrarily and fortunes seized, leading wealthy individuals to look for ever more creative ways to hide their wealth rather than investing it.
The power of a judicial branch, or of religious authorities who are the custodians of the law, lies only in the legitimacy that they can confer on rulers and in the popular support they receive as protectors of a broad social consensus.
India and the Middle East differed from Europe was in the fact that their religious establishments did not extract themselves from the political order.
the state itself could not evolve as a separate secular institution.
The traditional rule of law did not survive modernization either in India or in the Muslim world, and that failure is particularly tragic in the latter case.
apply the Dharmasastra to ...
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traditional Hindu law as a living tradition collapsed.
a truncated system of traditional sharia and a Western legal system brought to them by the colonial powers.
the widespread demand for a return to the sharia throughout the Arab world reflect a grave dissatisfaction with the lawless authoritarianism of contemporary regimes in the region and a nostalgia for a time when executive power was limited by a genuine respect for law.
political power would be willing to live within predictable rules.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all based from a very early point on authoritative Scriptures.
only in Western Europe was the confusing welter of written texts, decrees, interpretations, and commentaries systematized with a view toward making them logically consistent.
Chinese Communist Party that is sovereign over the constitution.
no emperor ever acknowledged the primacy of any legal source of authority; law was only the positive law that he himself made.
enormous scope for...
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Wu Zhao had a daughter with the emperor, whom she arranged to have smothered
empress was accused of murdering Wu Zhao’s daughter;
former empress Wang and rival concubine chopped into pieces and stuffed in a wine vat.
