Profile Books The Rule of Laws: A 4000-year Quest to Order the World

If this is the sort of thing that interests you is is great. I could not put it down and read all 500+ pages in a few days.

Essential reading for those who want to follow the development of various global symptoms

I often am looking for a not-too-deep-in-the-weeds overview of legal history for a given place, which provides a general understanding of the entire *ecosystem* of legal systems there. This book is my new favorite starting point.We get, for example, a CONCISE overview of English law in the Anglo-Saxon period and the early and late Middle Ages that provides a sense of all of the different types of courts and what sorts of disputes they considered. (Too many historical overviews focus only on royal courts and never even mention, for example, admiralty or manor courts, leaving readers striving to understand the landscape of dispute resolution in a political system.)We get this for all kinds of systems around the world. Sometimes a strong anthropological lens is used to view dispute resolution as a truly cultural institution--how a tribunal might exemplify and reinforce various divisions in society. I would have liked that thread carried through a bit more to European and American systems, which instead get more of a state-solving-the-problem functional treatment.The book is big and it's hard not to feel exhausted and overwhelmed by the amount of information in it, even though the broad subject matter demands a fairly surface-level treatment. Those reasonably familiar, for example, with developments in Chancery in the 17th century or the prevalence and nature of arbitration in early US Colonial history may be frustrated with a lack of depth or nuance and worry that the landscape isn't quite fully rendered.Yet, viewed as a map that frames historical investigation for those struggling to orient themselves, this is a highly competent and engaging work.

I have done considerable research on the origin, content, and effect of laws, rules in other words. This book is the best I have found. Very readable because it is well thought out and well written. It has several excellent sections not found in other histories of law. An example is the effort by U.S. judges to find a basis for resolving land rights of newcomer Americans versus American Indians.It is marred by a British bias against the success of the U.S., and the predilection of British writers to assume a knowledge of the U.S. that they don't have. Author goes out her way to pooh-pooh the U. S. Constitution (because the British didn't think to invent such a thing).

Laws from the beginning are considered in light of the author's research in non-western cultures. A surprisingly good read with many interesting observations.