Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law (1897)

Am. J. Comp. L., 2006

University of Westminster Online Working Papers

Journal of Environmental Law, 2009

Deplano and Tsagourias (eds) Research Methods in International Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar Publishing)., 2020

This chapter argues that a plurality of methods does not entail that there are no basic and determinate philosophical problems for the field. It argues that there are two central requirements for a philosophy of international law, demarcation and critique.

2000

Abstract: In this paper I intend to signal an independent appraisal of the roots of the Western Legal Tradition as both a critique of this tradition's originalism, and of its being a tradition at all, thereby challenging the premises behind new projects of international cultural governance in the context of globalisation. From the standpoint of legal history and comparative law this paper shows that Roman Law has no claim to supremacy in the ancient world.

Studies in Late Antiquity, 2018

To date, early Christian sources have drawn the scholarly attention of theologians, scholars of biblical commentary, and historians, but not of legal historians, presumably because such sources do not offer sufficiently substantial material for legal historical research. Nevertheless, a few studies have blended legal history and late antique Christianity, and an analysis of these studies shows they are based on a " centralist, " or " formalist–positivist, " conceptualization of law. In this paper I review the scholarship of legal traditions in the eastern Roman Empire— namely, Roman law and Greek legal traditions, the halakha in rabbinic literature , and the halakhic traditions in Qumranic literature and in the New Testament—and con-textualize it within developments in legal theory and legal sociology and anthropology (that is, the rise of legal pluralism). This review shows that developments in legal theory, in legal sociology and anthropology, and in legal history of the late antique world are producing new paradigms and models in the study of late antique legal history. These new models, together with new methods in reading early Christian non-legal texts of the eastern Roman Empire, can be utilized in the study of early Christianity, thereby opening gateways to the study of its legal traditions and revealing independent legal traditions that have remained hidden to date.

Ratio Juris: An International Journal of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law 19:3, 287-313 , 2006