Synopsis

In Black Gaius (2000), first published in Hastings Law Journal and then translated into Spanish, Chinese and Italian, Monateri radically questioned the roots of the so called Western Legal Tradition.
In this work the Author would signal an independent appraisal of the roots of the Western Legal Tradition as both a critique of this tradition's originalism, and of its being a tradition at all, thereby challenging the premises behind new projects of international cultural governance in the context of globalisation. From the standpoint of legal history and comparative law this paper shows that Roman Law has no claim to supremacy in the ancient world. The myth of this supremacy was manufactured by the biases of xix century European historicism so that the Western indebtedness toward non-Western civilizations was denied. The rejection of conventional unsound picture has important consequences for the consciousness of the Western legal tradition as such, which is to be seen more as a multicultural enterprise than as the peculiar evolution of one culture. This implies that the projects of governance based on the conventional picture are untenable, and must be abandoned.


Keywords: Comparative Law, Roman Law, Globalisation, Critical Studies, State, Contract,Tradition, German Law, African Law, Law and Politics, Law and Culture, Cultural Studies
JEL Classifications: K10, K30, K40

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