Irish law: significant numbers and the law of status

Utah History Textbooks and Utah History

Although the surviving written texts must be our evidence, they are not identical with the subject to be investigated. The great bulk of legal activity was oral, and on this the written sources often shed only an indirect light. In spite of this difficulty, however, we must be concerned with the totality, both written and unwritten, since otherwise explanation will be impossible. It will also be necessary to examine the principal Irish text of canon law, the ‘Collectio canonum Hibernensis’. I shall refer to the vernacular texts as native Irish law or as secular Irish law.

INTRODUCTION The historical roots of early Irish law stretch back into antiquity and were passed on in the rich oral history, poetry, sagas, law and wisdom-texts, that have come down to us. The body of law is frequently referred to as Brehon Law, so-called as it was applied by judges named breitheamhuin or brehons, in the Irish language. The more appropriate term is fenechas defined as ‘law of the Feni [freemen], customary or traditional law, [or] native law’. Promulgated or written law, much of it developed by the church, was known as Cain law. The primary old Irish law-text is the Senchas Mar (great tradition). This grounding document constitutes a third of all surviving law-texts. Reputedly originally assembled at the insistence of St. Patrick in the fifth century of the common era (CE), the Senchas Mar as we now know it was compiled in the seventh century CE and brings together a number of distinct texts, addressing a range of civil and political as well as economic and social matters. An understanding of old Irish law also requires recourse to a wide range of other law-texts, as well as oral tradition captured in the sagas, poems and wisdom-texts. Law-texts on issues as diverse as the law of bee-keeping, the status of poets (who were key to the learning and transmission of the law), the principal remedies for civil and criminal harm, and canon law demonstrate the breadth and depth of old Irish law. Although law in Ireland was not primarily legislative or king-made there was long tradition of national and local assemblies, such as the Feis of Tara, which may have served to ‘preserve [customary] laws and rules’. While kings could issue ordinances in times of emergency, law was primarily derived from custom and was found and interpreted by the legal class (poets and brehons) with strong clerical influences — an influence probably exercised by druids in earlier times. Though justice was primarily adjudicated by brehons, kings were linked to the process and may have adjudicated certain cases and/or played a role in approving the decision of a brehon. The Senchas Mar shows the significant influence of the church in revision of the law and may be seen as the end result of a collaborative process to reconcile ‘native oral custom with written Christian doctrine’.

Probably many people living in the UK today experience some degree of fear or suspicion, or even hostility, towards Shariah law. Barbaric punishments for breaches of criminal law, medieval cruelty in its treatment of apostates and women form vivid images of the practices of Shariah law in countries where it dominates as a system of law. But legal systems are far more complex, and points of engagement between Shariah and state law in non-Muslim countries receive less attention. Shariah, or Islamic, law appears to be very different from the more familiar state law, whether by state law we mean English law, Anglo-Welsh law, Anglo-Northern Irish law, Scots law, EU law or some combination of these. Islamic law is not isolated from state law and neither is it necessarily at odds with state law. The relationship between these systems is complex—as is the significance of non-state law—and not well understood by legislators, lawyers or the public at large. This comment is concerned with Halal food law. Food law in the UK is comprised mainly of strict liability regulation based on the criminal law and is enforced by local authority environmental health and trading standards services. A statutory authority—the Food Standards Agency— was set up in 1999 in order to ensure that high standards in the production and safety of food are maintained. This is a field that excites little interest amongst the general body of lawyers, but to Muslims food law is of primary concern. The distinction between that which is permitted—Halal—and that which is Haram, or forbidden, is of fundamental importance to Muslims. That does not mean that there is a consensus on what is permitted. Islamic jurisprudence is interpretative and based on religious scholarship and on various schools of thought that allow important differences to subsist in how juridical categories are interpreted. Shariah law is preoccupied with this complex and contested field: religious beliefs

The Federal Equity Power

This chapter begins by examining the origins of agonism in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s early text “Homer’s Contest.” It then attempts to formulate a political interpretation of agonism that could provide law and legal studies a post-Marxist and Nietzschean critical position in which democracy is central. A first attempt at the formulation is an analysis of the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt’s “antagonist” and “polemical” notion of politics that is based on a friend-enemy distinction, and of the consequences of such a notion for state constitutions and law. Schmitt serves as the background for the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, whose “agonistic pluralism” represents a conscious effort to moderate Schmitt’s existentially belligerent critique of liberalism into a workable politics in late modernity. Interpretations of agonism provided by William E. Connolly and Bonnie Honig and their possible links to law and legal studies are then briefly discussed. The chapter concludes that there is a kinship between political agonism understood in this way and a contemporary strain in political theory represented by, for example, Jacques Rancière. The roots of this kinship are traced finally to a post-Marxist tradition of “radical liberalism.”

The fragmentary nature of evidence for the Early Christian period makes an interdisciplinary approach essential for the reconstruction of past landscapes and settlement patterns.1 Despite the efforts of the Group for the Study of Irish Historical Settlement to foster interdisciplinary links, much modern research remains unconcerned with the need to present an integrated understanding of the past.2 Would-be practitioners of a multidisciplinary approach may have been discouraged by the hostile reception which greeted Smyth’s innovative contributions to Early Christian studies.3 Although one such critic professed ‘unqualified admiration’ for his multidisciplinary approach,4 Smyth was attacked for his dependence on secondary sources, especially his reliance on Ancient Laws of Ireland, the flawed Victorian English-language translation of early Irish law. More importantly, Smyth was justifiably admonished for minimising the importance of early Irish law as a source for settlement history.5Would these attacks have been less virulent, and shorter, if the academic in question had not strayed beyond the boundaries of his core discipline? In another instance illustrating the pitfalls of interdisciplinary research, considerable space has been given by an archaeologist to changes in the social hierarchy of the period based on an outdated theory from the field of Early Irish Law.6Thus, multidisciplinarians become uneasy consumers of a published product beyond their individual expertise, of works whose limitations are often known only to those at the core of individual disciplines. Despite these inherent dangers, this chapter reviews recent developments in a wide range of specialisms which have improved our understanding of Early Christian settlement.

This volume contains a critical edition of the Old Irish law tract Corus Besgnai(The Arrangement of Discipline), one of the constituent tracts of the late seventh-century compilation Senchas Mar(The Great Tradition). It has taken the editor a very long time to bring this work to completion, but the result is a highly accurate and informative edition representing the highest standard of scholarship in early Irish language and law.

Old Irish law tracts provide valuable insights into the practice of medicine in Ireland during the early medieval period. While the focus of the law texts relating to medicine was predominantly medico-legal, with an emphasis on computing compensation for injury, an understanding of contemporary medical practice can also be inferred from such texts. Male and female practitioners used herbs and surgery to treat their patients and supervised nursing care with a particular emphasis on diet. Physicians also provided an all-important public prognosis for the patient. The nature of the injury, the probable outcome and the status of the victim determined the level of compensation to be paid by the guilty party. Practitioners were also sometimes called upon to adjudicate in intimate and marital affairs. Synthesising information gleaned from the Old Irish law tracts, this article provides a unique insight into medicine in early medieval Ireland in terms of the status of physicians, known medical knowledge and contemporary practice.

This paper presents a detailed study of the determinants of social status as set out in Críth Gablach (c. AD 700), an Irish law tract on social classification which attempts a systematic analysis of the status of the free and noble classes (excluding the church and the professions) in early medieval Irish society. The nature and determinants of status are considered and the ranks of society set out in detail. To be a noble was to be hereditarily a lord of freemen in clientship – lordship rather than actual income ennobled, though other factors were relevant. For the non-noble freeman, a house, land and material assets are the basis of status. Lordship, however, appears to be economically central to the condition of the non-noble grades. Críth Gablach is one of the few outstanding pieces of social analysis from early medieval Europe.

abstract: This article concerns the fragmentarily attested early Irish legal text Fidbretha ‘Tree-Judgments’. Although this text is often mentioned by scholars of early Irish law as an important source of information about early Irish trees, no edition or translation of the text has been published thus far. Fidbretha is compared with other sources related to trees and forests and an edition and translation of the text appears in the Appendix.

Regnal succession in early medieval Ireland

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This article provides a comparative analysis of laws on youth policy and patriotic education in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine (as a control case), as well as model laws developed by the Commonwealth of Independent States. These laws are aimed at educating young people and transferring values of loyalty and obedience to authoritarian rule, as well as love and patriotic devotion to the Motherland, as means to legitimise and sustain authoritarian regimes. The article identifies similarities, differences and cases of ‘authoritarian legal harmonization’ in these laws. To compare the similarities and differences in the laws, we use plagiarism software. The software detects words and phrases which are the same or similar, in order to establish the extent to which the texts of laws are harmonised. Our research indicates that levels of legal harmonisation have fallen as new amendments and laws have been introduced, signalling a weakening of Russia’s influence.

Liam Breatnach’s Quiggin Lecture, The Early Irish law text Senchas Már and the question of its date, proposed that the Senchas Már was written in a single effort mounted by the church of Armagh within the date range c. 660 × c. 680. This revised and expanded version of a lecture given in 2017 accepts that there was a link between Armagh and the Senchas Már, sets the latter in the context of the written laws of Western Europe, 400–800, and investigates how the Senchas Már might have fitted into the sequence of seventh-century texts pertaining to Patrick. It also tackles two related issues: the relationship between evolving ideas of Irish nationality, the Patrician legend and the Senchas Már, and how one might bridge the gap between the Patrick of the saint’s own writings and conceptions of Patrick current in the seventh century.