Hybrid | Ancient Greek law as a lens on legal theory: of promulgation & purpose

Speaker: Professor Melissa Lane (Princeton University)

Chair: The Right Hon Lady Rose of Colmworth (Justice of the Supreme Court)

About the lecture

H.L.A. Hart’s genealogical account of the emergence of law lays little stress on its promulgation, and even less on any role for writing or any other particular technology of writing. Yet if we consider the emergence of ancient Greek laws, especially as the classical Greeks themselves understood that emergence, we find the questions of promulgation and writing to have been repeatedly highlighted. These questions were especially associated with the attributions made by classical Greeks to the figures of the great lawgivers, some of whom certainly existed (Solon of Athens), others of whom may be apocryphal (Lycurgus of Sparta). I argue that these lawgivers were figures in whom the question of promulgation and its best means could be linked to the ethical purpose of law in educating citizens. Indeed, each singular lawgiver was attributed with a particular telos or purpose unifying the body of laws that they promulgated. By taking ancient Greek history as a case study for the emergence of law, and considering the role putatively played by lawgivers (as understood by classical Greeks themselves), we can reconsider the approach of modern legal theory to the questions of both promulgation and ethical purpose.

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About the speaker

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University. A former Marshall Scholar, Truman Scholar, and Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Lane received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and then taught at Cambridge for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009.  In 2023, she was appointed to a three-year term as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, in London (a non-teaching appointment). During the 2024-25 academic year she is on sabbatical from Princeton and holding several further positions in the UK: in UCL, as Honorary Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Visiting Fellow at the Keeling Centre for Ancient Philosophy; in the University of Oxford, as the Isaiah Berlin Visiting Professor; and in the School of Advanced Study, University of London, as Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Classical Studies. She has previously held visiting appointments at other institutions including the American Academy in Rome and the École Normale Supérieure. Her most recent book, published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, is titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political.  She has written several recent public opinion pieces about ancient Greek ideas in dialogue with American constitutional history, law and politics.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

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You can attend this event in-person at UCL Faculty of Laws (Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens, London WC1H 0EG) or alternatively you can join via a live stream.

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Image by Miltiadis Fragkidis from Unsplash