What's the Value of a Stray Cattle?

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People have looked at this and said, well, how can people have followed these laws? Certainly for the hundreds of years through which that steeley was standing and people were still referring to it. They did that about a millennium, and so surely the laws are out of date. My own view is that, er, these were more exemplary. So we didn't expect people to apply them exactly wey weren't like our rules that the judges have to follow in detail. But they more gave an indication of the sorts of compensation that should be given for different sorts of wrongs or crimes. The sorts of things that were worse, that might merit the death penalty, as we call them

Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. The variety of the world’s laws has long been almost as great as the variety of its societies.

In this conversation, Shermer speaks with Oxford professor of the anthropology of law, Fernanda Pirie, who traces the rise and fall of the sophisticated legal systems underpinning ancient empires and religious traditions, showing how common people — tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers — called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and build civilizations. What truly unites human beings, Pirie argues, is our very faith that laws can produce justice, combat oppression, and create order from chaos.