Ancient

King Hammurabi of Babylon issued 282 laws carved on a diorite stele, found by archaeologists at Susa in 1901 and now displayed in ...

Roman plebeians demanded law be written down so magistrates could not rule by whim, and a commission produced twelve bronze tablet...

Justinian directed his jurists to gather and purify a millennium of Roman law into the Code, the Digest, the Institutes, and later...

Lex talionis appears in the Code of Hammurabi and in the Hebrew scriptures, limiting revenge to equivalence: the harm done, no mor...

From the Stoics and Cicero through Aquinas to Grotius, natural law theory holds that binding rules flow from reason and the nature...

Canon law grew from church councils and papal rulings into a complete legal system, systematized in the Decretum of Gratian around...

Sharia designates the path of law Islam derives from scripture and the example of the Prophet, elaborated by jurists into schools ...

Issued in the name of Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, or possibly his son Shulgi, the code predates Hammurabi's by r...

Before Draco, Athenian law was oral and interpreted by aristocratic magistrates, a source of resentment that writing the law down ...