Melissa Lane (Princeton): 1. Genealogies of law and lawgivers from Zaleucus to Hart

Professor Melissa Lane will deliver the Isaiah Berlin Lectures in Michaelmas Term 2024. Professor Lane is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University.  Her lectures will take place on the following Tuesdays at 5pm: 29th October, 5 November, 12 November, 19 November, 26 November and 3 December. The first lecture will be held at St Luke's Chapel and lectures two to six will be held in the Philosophy Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities.

29 Oct:  Genealogies of law and lawgivers from Zaleucus to Hart

Why and how have lawgivers figured in legal and political philosophy, both in history and in theory? The question can be asked of the contemporary legal philosopher Herbert Hart, who discussed a putative sovereign lawgiver dubbed 'Rex' as part of his critique of John Austin, before introducing his own genealogical reconstruction of the origin of law. Yet it can also be asked of political theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who denied that the 'great Legislator' necessary for the institution of a social contract should be sovereign at all. And it can be asked of authors who wrote in ancient Greek, whose ideas about the nature of law and politics were formulated both in practice and in philosophical theorising through appeal to such figures: from classical accounts of Zaleucus (believed to be the first Greek lawgiver) and Lycurgus (the most influential), to the discussion of Moses in comparison to Greek lawgivers by post-classical authors Philo and Josephus (both writing in Greek). I argue that no more than in Hart's genealogy, or Philip Pettit's recent reworking thereof, did the ancient Greeks generally understand lawgivers to have been necessary for law to come into being as a social institution. Rather, Greek lawgivers can be construed as having served as embodied versions of Hart's 'rules of recognition', making identifiable the relevance and applicability of a particular set of laws to a particular community. Unlike Hart, however, the Greek lawgivers were also construed as having centered the moral purpose of law: each singular lawgiver was attributed with a particular telos or purpose unifying the body of laws that they promulgated. The next lecture explores the role of the telos of the lawgiver.