Every historian runs into law in one or another way: Letters refer to legal disputes; court records describe relations among neighbors; families are bound together and broken apart by law. Nor can law be separated from such large social and economic systems as slavery, feudalism, capitalism, or colonialism. Not every historian must be a legal historian, but some basic literacy in the institutions, sources, and ideas that surround law is likely to be helpful.
Herzog manages to provide such literacy, and more, in a brisk text of 243 pages. In different times and places, people have understood the law in distinctive ways. Herzog selects three topics that recurrently arise: Is law fundamentally of divine or human origin? Whatever its origin, what are the sources people use to determine what the law is? What institutions determine and apply the law? With only a handful of exceptions, she does not describe the...