Tamar Herzog

Is the past gone, or does it tell us something essential about the present and the future

s, I am interested in deciphering how norms were generated, in order to indicate how they should be read and understood given their particular historical context. I am also keen on demonstrating that their comprehension may tell us something important about whom we came to be.

Throughout the pages of this book, I constantly engage with two major narratives that have accompanied most research on legal history. The first portrayed law almost as a given. Sensitive to how particular solutions changed over time, for example, how contracts were drawn up or what proving a case in court required in different periods, on most accounts it implicitly assumed that law was law. It was as if society had changed, and so had its rules, but law as a field of action and a depository of knowledge and techniques remained the same. For most authors, law included norms that people obeyed, as if where these norms originated, how they were comprehended, which other types of norms existed, and who implemented them and in which way mattered very little. This narrative often seemed to imply that it was almost
inconsequential whether law was attributed to communal creation (as in customary law), God (as in canon law), legislators, or judg