For much of the past century, socio-legal studies and ancient legal
history have gone separate ways, the former focusing on the contemporary
development of the law, its regulatory function in society and the
social aspects of law creation, the latter concentrating on the
historical development of legal institutions and, inevitably, on the
problems posed by the sources themselves. This increasing isolation
would have come as a surprise to been not so easy to foresee in the turn
of the century, when figures such as Max Weber or Leon Petrazycki
incarnated the, a priori natural, connection between legal history and
sociology of law. The twentieth century turn from factography to social
and economic history has stimulated also among legal historians a
renewed interest in the connections between law and society, and in the
law as cultural expression, part of the so-called history of mentality.
Our Workshop is conceived as the first of a series aiming at renewing
the communication between these not so new currents in legal
historiography and the rich tradition of the sociology of law, and at
providing, from the inexhaustible realm of the ancient legal experience,
new materials for socio-legal study.
