236. Fernanda Pirie on The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the World

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2021

⏱️ 88 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Rulers throughout history have used laws to impose order. But laws were not simply instruments of power and social control. They also offered ordinary people a way to express their diverse visions for a better world. The variety of the world’s laws has long been almost as great as the variety of its societies.

In this conversation, Shermer speaks with Oxford professor of the anthropology of law, Fernanda Pirie, who traces the rise and fall of the sophisticated legal systems underpinning ancient empires and religious traditions, showing how common people — tribal assemblies, merchants, farmers — called on laws to define their communities, regulate trade, and build civilizations. What truly unites human beings, Pirie argues, is our very faith that laws can produce justice, combat oppression, and create order from chaos.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Shower
0:17.9	Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman. My guest today is Fernando Pirry and the author of the new book The Rule of Laws, a 4,000-year quest to order the world.
0:28.0	Fernando Piri is a professor of the anthropology of law at the University of Oxford. She's the University of Oxford.
0:34.0	She's the author of the anthropology of law,
0:37.0	textbook,
0:38.0	and has conducted field work in the mountains of Lydok
0:41.0	and the grasslands of Eastern Tibet. She earned her Doctorate of Philosophy and
0:47.4	Social Anthropology from Oxford in 2002. Masters in Social Anthropology at the University College London in 1998, and she lives in Oxford.
1:07.0	So this was quite the interesting conversation, as is her book, in terms of thinking about issues of law and order which
1:16.2	have been in the news rather a lot lately people taking belong to their own hands
1:20.9	vigilantism and self-help justice, and so on.
1:25.0	And so I asked her a lot about that, and starting with the question,
1:29.8	why do we need laws at all?
1:31.7	Can we all just get along? Apparently not.
1:34.7	Definitely not. And so we go back in time to the first kings of ancient Mesopotamia
1:40.5	and the laws that they wrote down.
1:44.0	To the what extent laws were involved with religion,
1:47.2	that is most of the biblical laws and Sharia law and so on
1:50.8	were very much wrapped up in secular governments and and their laws.
1:56.7	Chinese emperors and and Tibetan communities that she lived among and how they solved conflicts.
2:07.0	Conflict resolution is a huge part of legal systems.
2:10.0	Talked about slavery and how it was ultimately abolished.
	...

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