Greek law, legal systems of the ancient Greeks, of which the best known is the law of Athens. Although there never was a system of institutions recognized and observed by the nation as a whole as its legal order, there were a number of basic approaches to legal problems, certain methods used in producing legal effects, and a legal terminology, all shared to varying degrees …
Greek Law has won several awards including the UofL’s Spirit of Service award in 2018. The program has since evolved into a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization. In 2020, Wilkerson began writing for the online legal journal, “I Taught the Law”. His column, “The Title IX Guy” breaks down legal issues in the realm of sexual assault in ...
Greek law thereby avoided becoming excessively technical and never saw the development of a specialised legal profession. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in the history of law, as well as ancient historians. ... Search Title: required Please provide a title, maximum of …
3551 nómos – law. 3551 ( nómos) is used of: a) the Law (Scripture), with emphasis on the first five books of Scripture; or b) any system of religious thinking (theology), especially when nomos occurs without the Greek definite article. 3551 /nómos ("law") then can refer to "the Law ," or " law " as a general principle (or both simultaneously ).
Ancient Greek law consists of the laws and legal institutions of Ancient Greece . The existence of certain general principles of law is implied by the custom of settling a difference between two Greek states, or between members of a single state, by resorting to external arbitration. The general unity of Greek law shows mainly in the laws ...
Athenian laws are typically written in the form where if an offense is made, then the offender will be punished according to said law, thus they are more concerned with the legal actions which should be undertaken by the prosecutor, rather than strictly defining which acts are prosecutable.
However, attributing specific legal innovations and reforms to Solon and his successors is notoriously difficult because there was a tendency in ancient Athens to ascribe laws to Solon irrespective of the date of enactment.
Ancient Greek courts were cheap and run by laypeople. Court officials were paid little, if anything, and most trials were completed within a day, with private cases done even quicker. There were no court officials, no lawyers, and no official judges. A normal case consisted of two litigants, arguing if an unlawful act had been committed. The jury would decide whether the accused was guilty, and should he be guilty, what the punishment will be. In Athenian courts, the jury tended to be made of the common people, whereas litigants were mostly from the elites of society.
The treatise on the Constitution of Athens includes an account of the jurisdiction of the various public officials and of the mechanics of the law courts , and thus enables historians to dispense with the second-hand testimony of grammarians and scholiasts who derived their information from that treatise.
In Ancient Athens, there were two types of lawsuit. Public prosecutions, or graphai, were heard by juries of 501 or more, increasing in increments of 500 jurors, while private suits, or dikai, were heard by 201 or 401 jurors, depending on the amount of money at stake. Juries were made up of men selected from a panel of 6,000 volunteers, who were selected annually and were required to be full citizens, aged over 30. Juries were paid a small fee from the time of Pericles, which may have led to disproportionate numbers of poor and elderly citizens working on juries.
The general unity of Greek law shows mainly in the laws of inheritance and adoption, in laws of commerce and contract, and in the publicity uniformly given to legal agreements.
Calhoun, George M. ( 1927) The Growth of Criminal Law in Ancient Greece. Berkeley and Los Angeles Google Scholar.
While other early communities wrote codes of law for academic or propaganda purposes, the Greeks used writing extensively to make their laws available to a relatively large segment of the community . On the other hand, the Greeks made little use of writing in litigation whereas other cultures used it extensively in this area, often putting written documents at the heart of the judicial process. Greek law thereby avoided becoming excessively technical and never saw the development of a specialised legal profession. This book will be of interest to those with an interest in the history of law, as well as ancient historians.
Cohen, David 2014. A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic . p. 165.
In everyday speech, we use the term “lawyer ” to mean an attorney, one who represents another in a legal courtroom. The Bible, however, attaches another definition—a religious one. When you encounter the word “lawyer” in Scripture, concentrate on the “law” root. The “law” here is the Mosaic Law, the codified system of rules ...
Acts 5:34: “Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space;….” (According to Acts 22:3, Gamaliel was one of the rabbinical mentors of Saul of Tarsus [later the Apostle Paul].
The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia says the Greek word is nomikos: “according or pertaining to law,” i.e. legal; as no un, “an expert in law,” “about the law,” “lawyer.” “Their business was threefold: (1) to study and interpret the law; (2) to instruct the Hebrew youth in the law; (3) to decide questions of the law.
The “law” here is the Mosaic Law, the codified system of rules and regulations meant to govern Israel in JEHOVAH God’s ways as the nation lived in His land, the Promised Land. The suffix “ –er ” means “one who practices.”. A “lawyer,” therefore, was an expert or scholar of the Mosaic Law.
A lawyer seems to be identical to a “scribe” (this latter appellation emphasizes the man’s ability to write/copy Scripture and other religious texts). The word is comparable to “doctor.” This is not a medical doctor (physician)—please note—but a doctor of theology (what we would call a “Th.D.”). He was a very learned man in Jewish religion and skilled in the interpretation and application of the Mosaic Law. While not an exact equivalent, it may help to understand him as a theologian (as we think of one).
The most famous lawyer of this period was Hammurabi the Lawyer. His code of law gave lawyers hundreds of new business opportunities. By creating a massive legal system, the demand for lawyers increased ten-fold. In those days, almost any thief or crook could kill a sheep, hang-up a sheepskin, and practice law, unlike the highly regulated system today which limits law degrees to only those thieves and crooks who haven't been convicted of a major felony.
Greece and Rome saw the revival of the lawyer in society. Lawyers were again allowed to freely practice, and they took full advantage of this opportunity. Many records exist from this classic period. Legal cases ranged from run-of-the-mill goat contract cases to the well-known product liability case documented in the Estate of Socrates vs. Hemlock Wine Company. (See Wilson, Phillips ed. Famous Roman Cases. Houghton, Mifflin publishers, 1949.)
A major breakthrough for lawyers occurred in the 17th century. Blackstone the Magician, on a trip through Rome, unearthed several dozen ancient Roman legal texts. This new knowledge spread through the legal community like the black plague. Up until that point, lawyers used the local language of the community for their work. Since many smart non-lawyers could then determine what work, if any, the lawyer had done, lawyers often lost clients, and sometimes their head.
(In fact, there are over 750,000 lawyers in this country.) Every facet of life today is controlled by lawyers. Even Dan Quayle (a lawyer) claims, surprise, that there are too many lawyers. Yet until limits are imposed on legal birth control, the number of lawyers will continue to increase. Is there any hope? We don't know and frankly don't care since the author of this book is a successful, wealthy lawyer, the publishers of this book are lawyers, the cashier at the bookstore is a law student, and your mailman is a lawyer. So instead of complaining, join us and remember, there is no such thing as a one-lawyer town.
The attempted sale of the Sphinx resulted in the Pharaoh issuing a country-wide purge of all lawyers. Many were slaughtered, and the rest wandered in the desert for years looking for a place to practice. Greece and Rome saw the revival of the lawyer in society.
Previously, lawyers had relied on oral bills for collection of payment, which made collection difficult and meant that if a client died before payment (with life expectancy between 25 and 30 and the death penalty for all cases, most clients died shortly after their case was resolved), the bill would remain uncollected.
Legal anthropology suffered a setback at the turn of the century in the famous Piltdown Lawyer scandal. In order to prove the existence of the missing legal link, a scientist claimed he had found the skull of an ancient lawyer. The skull later turned out to be homemade, combining the large jaw of a modern lawyer with the skull cap of a gorilla. When the hoax was discovered, the science of legal anthropology was set back 50 years.
Along with the official enforcement of the law in the courts in the Grecian states, justice and social cohesion were collectively enforced by society at large, with informal collective justice often being targeted at elite offenders.
Ancient Greek courts were cheap and run by laypeople. Court officials were paid little, if anything, and most trials were completed within a day, with private cases done even quicker. There were n…
There is no systematic collection of Greek laws; thus knowledge of the earliest notions of the subject is derived from the Homeric poems. The works of Theophrastus, On the Laws, included a recapitulation of the laws of various barbaric as well as of the Grecian states, yet only a few fragments of it remain. The earliest shown Greek Laws date back to the code of laws by Draco and Solon, who both had an immense impact on early Greek Law.
Historians consider the Ancient Athenian law broadly procedural and concerned with the administration of justice rather than substantive. Athenian laws are typically written in the form where if an offense is made, then the offender will be punished according to said law, thus they are more concerned with the legal actions which should be undertaken by the prosecutor, rather than strictly defining which acts are prosecutable. Often, this would have resulted in juries havin…
The earliest Greek law to survive is the Dreros inscription, a seventh century BC law concerning the role of kosmos. This and other early laws (such as those which survive in only fragmentary form from Tiryns) are primarily concerned not with regulating people's behaviour, but in regulating the power of officials within the community. These laws were probably set up by the élites in order to control the distribution of power among themselves. Early Greek Law was composed of four cha…
Xenelasia was the practice in Sparta of expelling foreigners and discouraging citizens from traveling outside.
The Athenians chose a different way when it came to the court system. They used different proposals in each type of decision made through various cases. In the Athenian legal system, there were no professional lawyers, though well-known speechwriters such as Demosthenescomposed speeches which were delivered by, or on behalf of others. These speechwriters have been described as being as close as a function of a modern lawyer as the Athenian legal syste…
• Andrewes, A. "The Growth of the Athenian State". In Boardman, John; Hammond, N.G.L (eds.). The Cambridge Ancient History Volume III, Part 3: The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C. ISBN 0-521-23447-6.
• Carey, Christopher (1998). "The Shape of Athenian Laws". The Classical Quarterly. 48 (1): 93–109. doi:10.1093/cq/48.1.93.