Fernanda Pirie | LIWA | The Rule of Laws

Fernanda Pirie, professor of the anthropology of law at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford, England.

This seminar presents an overview of the various legal systems that have existed across the globe over the past four thousand years. It outlines key insights into major legal systems—including those of Mesopotamia, Israel, China, India, Rome and the Islamic world—alongside examples of diverse laws created in local contexts such as Armenia, Iceland, North Africa and medieval Europe.

Pirie addresses the methodological questions raised by this project, including how to define what counts as “law” for such an exercise. Pirie discusses how and why scholars can attempt comparisons among these distinct traditions, the benefits of this approach for legal scholars and comparatists, and the specific questions such comparisons can address.

To conclude, Pirie shares key conclusions from her recent book, The Rule of Laws, highlighting the advantages of studying law comparatively through the lens of form rather than function. She argues for the importance of law's symbolic effects alongside its role as a tool of government and social control. Illustrating the paradox of law as both an instrument of power and a means of resisting oppression, Pirie describes the long history of ideas surrounding the rule of law and its relevance to contemporary debates on the role of law in modern societies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Law, Society and Policy program.

Fernanda Pirie is professor of the anthropology of law at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford. She brings anthropological and comparative methods to the study of law in society. Alongside monographs on The Anthropology of Law (OUP, 2013) and The Rule of Laws: a 4,000-year quest to order the world (Profile Books, Basic Books, 2021), she has studied laws in both contemporary and historic Tibet. She is currently engaged in a project to translate and analyse the legal texts of the Dalai Lamas’ government in seventeenth-century Tibet.