Book cover
Book cover

Arne Jarrick and Maria Wallenberg-Bondesson at the Centre for Cultural Evolution have published a book on the world history of laws, giving a concrete and comprehensive example of cultural dynamics in action.

This study of the long-term history of law-making aims at a better understanding of the cultural dynamics of human society as reflected in the efforts made to regulate human interaction.

Through a systematic comparative study of 4 000 years of law-making, spanning from Sumerian laws to the Napoleonic Codes and beyond, the book identifies certain general long-term changes. These long-term changes relate to the content as well as to the structuring principles of laws, for example, the emergence of equality before the law, the development of criminal law referring exclusively to victims towards laws also referring to victimless crimes (and back again), and, moreover, the evolution of hierarchical structuring principles of laws.

The book is also a contribution to the discussion on long-term cultural change, in particular on the relation between societal change and increasing complexity of social interaction.