The Crucial Question: What Was the First Law?

Eric Liu: I realized that I had some kind of skill taking complex, just like you have with anthropological subjects, with complex legal subjects and making stories out of them. The first written laws we have come from Iraq, the Tigris Euphrates Valley, from about 2000 BC, 22-800 BC. And it struck me very quickly that sex, not necessarily just the act of sex, but the act of reproduction, families, marriage, all that were very much on the lines of the minds of our earliest lawmakers. "This is one of the things that I accept in my own mind is no one could ever have thought differently," Liu says.