Judaism as a religious legal system

Abstract

I have relatively little to say on the general classificatory issues of ‘legal families’ and ‘religious systems’ within them. Andrew Huxley’s Call for Papers has provided some of the scholarly background to these questions. There is, in fact, a significant difference between what David and Brierley have to say in the second edition of Major Legal Systems in the World Today (1978), based on the sixth French edition of 1974, as compared with their treatment of the issue in the original French edition of 1964 (Les Grands Systemes . . . ). In the latter, as Huxley reminds us, the fourth group (not regarded as a proper ‘family’) is classified as ‘systemes philosophiques ou religieux’, whose members David was hesitant even to call laws. By 1978, however, this fourth group had become (merely) ‘Other Conceptions of Law and the Social Order’, the ‘sole justification for grouping them together’ being ‘the fact that all of them are based upon conceptions of law and the social order which are altogether different from those prevailing in the West’.1