Top Highlights

• In aboriginal tribes, tribal life is guided by taboos, religious dogmas, customs, and the directions of tribal or family leaders. In the earliest civilizations, law complemented these other forms of social guidance, and in developed countries, law has largely displaced them.
• Fernanda Pirie’s The Rule of Laws: A 4000-Year Quest to Order the World
• early monarchs ran Egypt “without creating general rules.”
• Western models exercise outsized influence when officials develop and administer contemporary international law. The Rule of Laws studies how Western law came to dominate—even though other sources of law had head starts of 2,000 years and more.
• Civilian and common law systems were then introduced throughout the rest of the world as European nations colonized and took over most of the rest of the globe. And the same legal sources supplied the templates for international treaties and the international organizations that enforce treaties without “the backing of direct enforcement mechanisms”...

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