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This collection explores prefaces, prologues, paratexts, and other types of framing devices. It offers new ways to consider the significance of framing apparatuses regarding how and why they are created, remembered, forgotten, utilized, and recovered within legal traditions.
List of contents
1. More than Marginal: The Complex Work of Framing Devices
Part 1: Pulling Together 2. The Preambles to Archaic Greek Interstate Treaties at Olympia: A Study in the Diffusion of Diplomatic Language 3. Prefaces of Legal Documents in Late Imperial China 4. The Conservative Case for Warrior Law: Legal Change in Medieval Japan 5. Bodies of Law in Early Medieval England and Scotland 6. Preface to the Indian Penal Code, as Originally Drafted (October 1837)
Part 2: Breaking Apart 7. (Re-)framing Hammurabi's Laws: Worldbuilding with Prologues and Epilogues in the Ancient Near East 8. Prefaces in the Legal Texts of the Crusader Kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus 9. No Mere Metaphor: The State of Nature as Framing Device 10. Jefferson's Preambles, Prefaces, and Persistence 11. Martens' Clause and Ambiguity at the Birth of Modern Humanitarian Law 12. Searching for Meaning In the Utah Constitution's Free Market Preamble
About the author
Laura Culbertson (PhD Michigan, Near Eastern Studies) is a professor of Middle East Studies at American Public University. Her background is in Ancient Near Eastern history and archaeology, and her recent research interests include slavery and ancient law. On the topic of slavery, she edited
Slaves and Households in the Near East and co-edited
Society and the Individual in Mesopotamia, which includes a contribution Mesopotamian slavery. Other recent publications discuss legal pluralism and the social contexts of Mesopotamian law.
Susan Longfield Karr (Ph.D. University of Chicago, History): Longfield Karr's teaching and research focus on state- and empire-state formation and the emergence of the so-called modern rule of law within communities (constitutions) and between them (international law) from the late medieval through the early modern period. Her work pays particular attention to the meaning and significance of legal vocabularies within cultural, political, and juridical frameworks that accompany the history and development of rights (customary, civic, and natural) in the context of state and empire formation in Italy, Germany, France, and England. Most recently, she published
On Justice and Right: Jus gentium in Humanist Jurisprudence, wherein she explored the transformation of fundamental categories of Roman law such as ius and ius gentium by the fathers of legal humanism, Guillaume Budé, Ulrich Zasius, and Andrea Alciati (Brill, 2022). Dr. Longfield Karr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.
