Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Comparative and Foreign Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 19 of 19

Full-Text Articles in Comparative and Foreign Law

The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne Dec 2016

The Edict Of King Gälawdéwos Against The Illegal Slave Trade In Christians: Ethiopia, 1548 -- Featured Source, Habtamu M. Tegegne

The Medieval Globe

This study explores the relationship between documentary-legal prescriptions of slavery and actual practice in late medieval Ethiopia. It does so in light of a newly discovered edict against the enslavement of freeborn Christians and the commercial sale of Christians to non-Christian owners, issued in 1548 by King Gälawdéwos. It demonstrates that this edict emerged from a dramatic and violent encounter between the neighboring Sultanate of Adal, which was supported by Muslim powers, and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, which had the support of expanding European powers in the region. The edict was therefore issued to reaffirm and clarify the principles …


Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez Dec 2016

Land And Tenure In Early Colonial Peru: Individualizing The Sapci, "That Which Is Common To All", Susan E. Ramirez

The Medieval Globe

This article compares and contrasts pre-Columbian indigenous customary law regarding land possession and use with the legal norms and concepts gradually imposed and implemented by the Spanish colonial state in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Natives accepted oral histories of possession going back as many as ten generations as proof of a claim to land. Indigenous custom also provided that a family could claim as much land as it could use for as long as it could use it: labor established rights of possession and use. The Spanish introduced the concept of private property …


Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman Dec 2016

Chinese Porcelain And The Material Taxonomies Of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters With Disruptive Substances In Twelfth-Century Yemen, Elizabeth Lambourn, Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman

The Medieval Globe

This article focuses on a set of legal questions about ṣīnī vessels (literally, “Chinese” vessels) sent from the Jewish community in Aden to Fustat (Old Cairo) in the mid-1130s CE and now preserved among the Cairo Geniza holdings in Cambridge University Library. This is the earliest dated and localized query about the status of ṣīnī vessels with respect to the Jewish law of vessels used for food consumption. Our analysis of these queries suggests that their phrasing and timing can be linked to the contemporaneous appearance in the Yemen of a new type of Chinese ceramic ware, qingbai, which confounded …


The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner Dec 2016

The Future Of Aztec Law, Jerome A. Offner

The Medieval Globe

This article models a methodology for recovering the substance and nature of the Aztec legal tradition by interrogating reports of precontact indigenous behavior in the works of early colonial ethnographers, as well as in pictorial manuscripts and their accompanying oral performances. It calls for a new, richly recontextualized approach to the study of a medieval civilization whose sophisticated legal and jurisprudential practices have been fundamentally obscured by a long process of decontextualization and the anachronistic applications of modern Western paradigms.


Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn Dec 2016

Editor's Introduction To "Legal Worlds And Legal Encounters" -- Open Access, Elizabeth Lambourn

The Medieval Globe

This introduction presents and draws together the articles and themes featured in this special issue of The Medieval Globe, “Legal Worlds and Legal Encounters.”


The Medieval Globe 2.2 (2016) Dec 2016

The Medieval Globe 2.2 (2016)

The Medieval Globe

No abstract provided.


Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner Dec 2016

Mutilation And The Law In Early Medieval Europe And India: A Comparative Study -- Open Access, Patricia E. Skinner

The Medieval Globe

This essay examines the similarities and differences between legal and other precepts outlining corporal punishment in ancient and medieval Indian and early medieval European laws. Responding to Susan Reynolds’s call for such comparisons, it begins by outlining the challenges in doing so. Primarily, the fragmented political landscape of both regions, where multiple rulers and spheres of authority existed side-by-side, make a direct comparison complex. Moreover, the time slippage between what scholarship understands to be the “early medieval” period in each region needs to be taken into account, particularly given the persistence of some provisions and the adapatation or abandonment of …


Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson Dec 2016

Common Threads: A Reappraisal Of Medieval European Sumptuary Law, Laurel Wilson

The Medieval Globe

Medieval sumptuary law has been receiving renewed scholarly attention in recent decades. But sumptuary laws, despite their ubiquity, have rarely been considered comprehensively and comparatively. This essay calls attention to this problem and suggests a number of topics for investigation, with specific reference to the first phase of European sumptuary legislation in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It argues that comparative study demonstrates that this chronology closely parallels the development of the so-called “Western fashion system” and that the ubiquity of sketchy or nonexistent enforcement is evidence for the symbolic importance of sumptuary legislation, rather than its instrumentality. Comparison across …


Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr. Dec 2016

Toward A History Of Documents In Medieval India: The Encounter Of Scholasticism And Regional Law In The Smṛticandrikā, Donald R. Davis Jr.

The Medieval Globe

In order to understand the legal use and significance of documents in medieval India, we need to start from the contemporaneous legal categories found in the Sanskrit scholastic corpus called dharmaśāstra. By comparing these categories with actual historical documents and inscriptions, we gain better insight into the encounter of pan-Indian legal discourse in Sanskrit and regional laws in vernacular languages. The points of congruence and transgression in this encounter will facilitate a nuanced history of documents and their use beyond unhelpfully broad categories of written and oral. A new translation of one major scholastic discussion of documents is presented as …


Courage, Postimmunity Politics, And The Regulation Of The Queer Subject, Chantal Nadeau Jul 2016

Courage, Postimmunity Politics, And The Regulation Of The Queer Subject, Chantal Nadeau

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In this paper, I argue that courage is invoked in contemporary political discourses in such a way as to regulate queer legal subjectivities. That is, the discourses of courage re-articulate the social, legal, and political relations that define and restrict the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) citizens. Drawing on Roberto Esposito's theoretical elaboration of the concept of immunity, I remap the legal and political dynamics through which nations incorporate LGBT citizens into the polity. I discuss how the regulation of gay rights in a growing number of democracies in Europe, the Americas, and South Africa has contributed …


His Feminist Facade: The Neoliberal Co-Option Of The Feminist Movement, Anjilee Dodge, Myani Gilbert Apr 2016

His Feminist Facade: The Neoliberal Co-Option Of The Feminist Movement, Anjilee Dodge, Myani Gilbert

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Prostitution Policy: Legalization, Decriminalization And The Nordic Model, Ane Mathieson, Easton Branam, Anya Noble Apr 2016

Prostitution Policy: Legalization, Decriminalization And The Nordic Model, Ane Mathieson, Easton Branam, Anya Noble

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Don’T Risk It; Wait Until She’S Sober, Patrick John White Apr 2016

Don’T Risk It; Wait Until She’S Sober, Patrick John White

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Let’S Talk About Sex: A Call For Guardianship Reform In Washington State, Sage Graves Apr 2016

Let’S Talk About Sex: A Call For Guardianship Reform In Washington State, Sage Graves

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Let’S Invest In People, Not Prisons: How Washington State Should Address Its Ex-Offender Unemployment Rate, Sara Taboada Apr 2016

Let’S Invest In People, Not Prisons: How Washington State Should Address Its Ex-Offender Unemployment Rate, Sara Taboada

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


In Her Words: Recognizing And Preventing Abusive Litigation Against Domestic Violence Survivors, David Ward Apr 2016

In Her Words: Recognizing And Preventing Abusive Litigation Against Domestic Violence Survivors, David Ward

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Living Under The Boot: Militarization And Peaceful Protest, Charlotte Guerra Apr 2016

Living Under The Boot: Militarization And Peaceful Protest, Charlotte Guerra

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.


Rape And Sexual Violence: Questionable Inevitability And Moral Responsibility In Armed Conflict, Katherine W. Bogen Apr 2016

Rape And Sexual Violence: Questionable Inevitability And Moral Responsibility In Armed Conflict, Katherine W. Bogen

Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal at Clark (SURJ)

Wartime sexual violence is a critical human rights issue that usurps the autonomy of its victims as well as their physical and psychological safety. It occurs in both ethnic and non-ethnic wars, across geographic regions, against both men and women, and regardless of the “official” position of commanders, states, and armed groups on the use of rape as tactic of war. This problem is current, pervasive, and global in spite of the status of wartime sexual violence perpetration as a crime against humanity and the capacity of the international criminal court to indict offenders. Though some scholars have argued that …


Persistence And Resistance: Women’S Leadership And Ending Gender-Based Violence In Guatemala, Serena Cosgrove, Kristi Lee Apr 2016

Persistence And Resistance: Women’S Leadership And Ending Gender-Based Violence In Guatemala, Serena Cosgrove, Kristi Lee

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

No abstract provided.