Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

This reading group examines comparative legal history with an emphasis on legal traditions and normative systems outside the canonical common law and civil law frameworks. Readings will address the legal history of non-Western and Indigenous societies, as well as international law and mixed or legally plural orders in which multiple sources of authority and normativity operate simultaneously.

The group begins with selected work in legal theory and sociology to consider the essential elements of law and the difficulties of formulating a conception sufficiently general to permit cross-cultural comparison, but not so general as to lose analytical purchase. We will then turn to questions of method and purpose in legal history and comparative inquiry: how legal historians identify and interpret “law” in contexts where institutions, categories, and sources differ from those presupposed by modern state-centered legal systems; what comparative analysis can and cannot explain; and how translation, power, and perspective shape historical accounts.

Meetings are discussion-based. The aim is to provide a structured setting for close reading and sustained conversation about how law has been constituted, recorded, and contested across diverse historical and cultural settings.

Note: This reading group will meet on the following dates: TBD.