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This collection explores prefaces, prologues, paratexts, and other types of framing devices. Across world history, these devices have introduced the law, articulated its context and audience, identified the basis of legal and moral authority, critiqued existing conditions, or even tried to "restore" something that never was. Scribes, lawmakers, and legal theorists also used frames to position the law in time and space, purporting to define populations and their identities. Despite the ubiquity and complexity of these phenomena, few studies have drawn out methods for studying their role in constructing, fortifying, or reimagining legal frameworks within legal cultures or traditions. This volume 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. The studies range from the ancient world to the modern nation-state system, aiming to explore the intersections and collisions between juridical and political interpretation practices.
The book will be of interest to academics and researchers in the areas of legal history, comparative law, legal cultures and traditions, legal theory, jurisprudence, constitutional law and legislative drafting.
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 (Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Near Eastern Studies) is Professor of Middle East Studies at American Public University.
Susan Longfield Karr (Ph.D., University of Chicago, History) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.
