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In "Legal Transplants," one of the world's foremost authorities on legal history and comparative law puts forth a clear and concise statement of his controversial thesis on the way that law has developed throughout history.

When it was first published in 1974, "Legal Transplants" sparked both praise and outrage. Alan Watson's argument challenges the long-prevailing notion that a close connection exists between the law and the society in which it operates. His main thesis is that a society's laws do not usually develop as a logical outgrowth of its own experience. Instead, he contends,...

When Justinian became sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 527, he ordered the preparation of three compilations of Roman law that together formed the Corpus Juris Civilis. These works have become known individually as the "Code," which collected the legal pronouncements of the Roman emperors, the "Institutes," an elementary student's textbook, and the "Digest," by far the largest and most highly prized of the three compilations. The "Digest" was assembled by a team of sixteen academic lawyers commissioned by Justinian in 533 to cull everything of value from earlier Roman law. It was...

Written by one of our most respected legal historians, this book analyzes the interaction of law and religion in ancient Rome. As such, it offers a major new perspective on the nature and development of Roman law in the early republic and empire before Christianity was recognized and encouraged by Constantine.

At the heart of the book is the apparent paradox that Roman private law is remarkably secular even though, until the late second century B.C., the Romans were regarded (and regarded themselves) as the most religious people in the world. Adding to the paradox was the fact that the...

To understand how law develops and how legal rules and structures relate to society, one must examine the issues both comparatively and historically, Alan Watson asserts. And in the Western world, he adds, in order to understand law comparatively, one must have knowledge of Roman law.

As his title suggests, Watson has divided the book into two related but independent parts. The first part, a revised and enlarged version of his 1970 volume The Law of the Ancient Romans, provides a comprehensive description of the system of Roman law. Watson begins with a discussion of law and...