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Our speaker writes:

From the great codifications such as Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis (529-534 C.E.) to celebrated legislation such as Magna Carta (1215), the history of law is often understood and written as a history of foundational documents. But how should we think about foundational documents at a time when legal culture was so dominated by customary law? Customary law formed the basis of the lay courts, and consisted of rules and procedure that developed from practice. This practice was increasingly shaped by written rules and administrative practices in the twelfth and thirteenth century, it was largely not a practice based on Ur-texts. This talk will examine early bodies of customary law composed in thirteenth-century Northern France in order to think about what a foundational legal document meant to a legal culture that did not primarily turn around foundational documents.

About our speaker:

Ada Kuskowski is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow at Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (Fall 2021). She is a medieval historian and a legal historian and currently finishing revisions on her book manuscript, Vernacular Law: Writing and the Reinvention of Customary Law in Medieval France.