Black Gaius: A Quest for the Multicultural Origins of the 'Western Legal Tradition'

Abstract

This article is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to reconstructing the historical self-consciousness of the Western Legal Tradition, showing the emergence of a model based on the more or less explicit assumptions of Roman, and subsequently Western, legal originalism and supremacy. In the second part, different areas are investigated--contract, theories of government, dispute settlements, and legal culture-to challenge the same existence of a Roman law at the root of modem Western laws. In this way the package of received ideas in legal scholarship about the history and nature of the Western legal culture is revealed to be a groundless, politically motivated, ideological artifact. The political motive here is to question the Western cultural dominance in the field of law, and the use made of Comparative Law to support it, in favor of a more multicultural view.

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