Book Reviews
The Rule of Laws: A 4000-Year Quest to Order the World By Fernanda Pirie Basic Books 2021
571 pages, $19.99
Reviewed by Christopher C. Faille
In what follows, I will use two expressions that I find nowhere in the book being reviewed. I will speak here of “street law” on the one hand and of “grand law” on the other. The distinction those labels suggest is integral to this book. The book turns out to be all about the troubled relationship between those two sorts of law, and it has alongside its merits the one minor flaw of never putting the theme quite that concisely. The subtitle of Fernanda Pirie’s book speaks of a 4,000-year quest to order the world. That time reference is presumably an allusion to the Code of Hammurabi, the renowned law-giver who acquired the throne of Babylonia in 1793 B.C. If we take that as the beginning of the “quest,” then it has now lasted 3,815 years, close enough for this rounding-out. The dust jacket of this book, though, includes a blurb from Edward J. Watts, an 32 • THE FEDERAL LAWYER • May/June 2022
authority on the fall of the Roman Republic, who teaches at the University of California San Diego. Oddly, the Watts blurb praises the author for the masterly way in which she leads the reader “across five millennia.” Even before opening the book, then, one may be wondering: why does the chronology as Watts understands it differ so markedly from the chronology that justifies the subtitle? Are we looking to 5,000 or merely a little less than 4,000? The answer is that in the first chapter of this book, before we reach Hammurabi, Pirie introduces us to a family in the city of Lagash, a family whose name is lost to us, but one that established itself as the royal family there around 2900, in the region we would now describe as southeastern Iraq. The self-elevation of one Lagash family to a monarchy seems to have inspired something of a race to do likewise among families in neighboring cities, and soon all the new kings between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates were proclaiming that they could intercede with the gods on behalf of their people. This actually meant that they were interceding in the lives of their people on behalf of their gods. The preliminary material here, covering the development of law between the lost names of a family in Lagash and the still-renowned name of Hammurabi in Babylon constitutes the difference between the four-millennia and the five-millennia readings of this book. Pirie—a professor of the anthropology of law at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford—gives the period between Lagash and Babylon just five pages. But it is a concisely expressed and factually packed five! Those five pages reference a King Uruinimgina, the last ruler of the first dynasty of Lagash, who, around 2450 B.C., had an inscription made in which he assured the gods that “never would [I] allow the orphan or the widow to suffer at the hands of the powerful.” By this time, then (as Pirie puts it), “Writing had become a means for kings to make grand statements about justice.” The statements that kings make, whether addressed to the gods or to the widows and
orphans supposedly under a grand name’s protection, have little or nothing to do with the actual lives of those widows and orphans. The grand law propounded by grand names is addressed to a void, and real history, along with what one may call street-level law, proceeds regardless. It is the grand law that seeks to “order the world,” in the words of this book’s subtitle, while a street-level law proceeds to order the specifics of the lives of ordinary people, usually in ways that get more sensible the more independent they prove from grand law and its promulgators.
Secure at the Top Let us regard that first post-Lagash period as prologue and look to the proper beginning of this book: Hammurabi. Pirie, using again her gift for concision, gives a brief account of the military campaigns that made Hammurabi’s Babylon the unchallenged capital of all the land between the two great rivers. Once secure at the top of the pyramid of power, Hammurabi dictated a law code that was inscribed on a granite slab and put in a public place so that all could see it and all who could read at all could study it. The slab also contains an image of the great king standing before the god of the Sun, Shamash, presumably receiving some infusion of instruction and authority. The slab contains 300 laws, some quite detailed. Some read more like case reports than statutes. Pirie quotes the following example, which I condense, “If a man has given a field to a gardener to plant as a date orchard … in the fifth year, the owner and gardener shall divide the yield in equal shares and the owner shall choose his share first.” This particular clause encourages several observations. First, clearly private property in land, and the lease of that land to commercial tenants for profit, was an accepted practice quite early in the development of civilization, although (then as now) the details needed thrashing out. Second, the thrashing out in question on this specific point—the respective shares in the profit of an enterprise that could be claimed by the landlord and the tenant—seems not really to have been
