Legal borrowing and its impact on Ottoman legal culture in the late nineteenth century

Rubin, Avi

doi:10.1017/s0268416007006339

Cited by 22 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…128 Although Greece in the nineteenth century is frequently referred to as a 'backward' state by nineteenth-century foreigners and twentieth-century Greek scholars, 129 an examination of the legal debates and practices of the first decades of the young Greek state indicates that Greece was engaged in the same debates as many other European states, while showing a remarkable flexibility that allowed a devastated country, with a highly illiterate population, to function more or less effectively. 130 To some degree, the Greek courts functioned in a similar manner to the later Nizamiye courts of the Ottoman Empire that combined French procedural practices with Hanafi Islamic law, 131 bridging familiar law with a novel procedure. Certainly the Greek judicial system managed to ingrain itself in the consciousness of Greeks, who used it extensively despite the novelty of its structure compared to that which they had used for centuries.…”

Section: The Practice Of Law In the Greek Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resurrecting the Law: State Formation and Legal Debates in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Doxiadis

2018

European History Quarterly

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This paper discusses the legal debates of nineteenth-century Greece and the attempts to produce a legal framework following the establishment of the modern Greek state. These debates had both a practical significance since such a framework was essential for the creation of a modern state, and an ideological one since the chosen framework would be a statement about how the new state perceived itself, its history, and its place in Europe. These questions were particularly relevant in the case of civil law as Greek legal scholars contemplated whether to accept the use of customary law, or to reject it, and if so what laws should replace it. In this paper, I examine this debate within the context of European legal developments and the process of codification undertaken throughout Europe from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, as well as the ideological and practical implications of the debate. I argue that, despite the belief that the efforts of Greek legal scholars led to the elimination of the use of customary law from the Greek judicial system, my research in the archival material of the Appeals Court of Athens indicates that customary law was still dominant a generation after the establishment of the modern Greek state. I conclude that a re-examination of the role and practices of the Greek courts in the nineteenth century is much needed as their flexibility thirty years after the creation of the Greek state is closer to the legal pluralism of the courts of the Ottoman period than to the model advocated by the contemporary legal scholars who demanded a ‘modern’ judicial system to assist the renaissance of the Greek nation.

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Section: The Practice Of Law In the Greek Courtsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resurrecting the Law: State Formation and Legal Debates in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Doxiadis

2018

European History Quarterly

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“…In order to realize the modifications of the regulation of laws related to sexuality in the Ottoman civilizing process, it is indispensable to take into consideration Tanzimat codifications derived from the French, Swiss and Belgian legal systems in the nineteenth century (see Bozkurt, 1996;Belgesay, 1999;Velidedeoğlu, 1999;Imber, 2004;Rubin, 2007). But previous to this, we should put, firstly, emphasis on the set of laws, called the Kanun, which was codified by the Sultan Suleyman in the sixteenth century (see İnalcık, 1993) and secondly, Ottoman code of laws, collated by İbrahim Halebi, which remained the foundation of Ottoman law until the reforms of the nineteenth century.…”

Section: _____________mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconfiguring Ottoman Gender Boundaries and Sexual Categories by the mid-19th century

Kınlı

2013

Política Soc.

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This research extends the theory of the civilizing process of Norbert Elias to the gender issue in the Ottoman Empire and thereby in some respects provides a test of his original theory. This study is based on the assumption that the conscious policy of the Ottoman modernization by the ruling elite exhibited many symptoms resembling those of the European civilizing process. The socio-historical process of bureaucratization of the Ottoman state fostered the changes in manners and forms of cultural expression which brought with it the advance of the threshold of shame and embarrassment in gender relations during this process. Drawing on this assumption, the article looks at the changes in the way people control themselves and others in the expression of their impulses and emotions. In turn, -the question of how the margins of tolerance in sexual matters and in the expression of emotions and desires changed during this civilizing process -formulates the major concern of this paper. Since manuals on etiquette, manners books, diaries and archives are the richest sources for this purpose, this project employs the analysis of these cultural texts, in order to make inferences from the cultural transformations within the Ottoman Empire. The research hopes to offer new perspectives in reorienting the way we look at the development of the Ottoman culture within the context of figurational sociology.

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“…The very act of codification may be argued to be originated from modern European Continental Law. 6 The extensive projects of statutory codification appear in the scholarship as evidence of the secularization of the law, energized by the incessant process of westernization. All these laws, except for the Civil Code (Mecelle, 1869(Mecelle, -1876 and the Land Code (1858) were adaptations of French positive law.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ottoman Judicial Change in the Age of Modernity: A Reappraisal

Rubin

2009

History Compass

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Legal reform was a key element in the passage of the Ottoman empire to modernity during the ‘long nineteenth century’. This article discusses the modern historiography of Ottoman judicial change while taking issue with the notions of secularization and westernization, which are omnipresent in the conventional legal history of the nineteenth century. An alternative conceptualization is called for, one that is free from the dichotomous and homogenizing binarity of religious/secular, thus allowing more nuanced representations of sociolegal change in general.

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Legal borrowing and its impact on Ottoman legal culture in the late nineteenth century

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

Resurrecting the Law: State Formation and Legal Debates in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Resurrecting the Law: State Formation and Legal Debates in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Reconfiguring Ottoman Gender Boundaries and Sexual Categories by the mid-19th century

Ottoman Judicial Change in the Age of Modernity: A Reappraisal

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