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Over the past decades, legal historians have become more cautious when it comes to rules that in the Middle Ages and the early modern period were defined as '(old) customs'. Earlier optimistic appraisals as to the age of such rules have been challenged. This article argues that efforts of debunking should be combined with a more thorough analysis of the legal consciousness of past societies. It proposes to look at old municipal private law, not as a set of rules fixed by tradition, but rather as a malleable body of norms. The symbolic qualities of law were such that renewal and rephrasal could be combined with an ideology of conservation. It was perfectly possible for administrators to promote new rules as being a part of an 'age-old law' of the city or the land, without breaching the implicit conventions as to the qualities of law. However, as will be demonstrated further, there were limits to the agency of administrators in this regard. The codes as to the features of law marked boundaries that had to be taken seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the emergence of compilations of a particular kind of legal riddle in the 8th/14th century, with special reference to the compilation of Ibn Farḥūn (d. 799/1397). Ibn Farḥūn's riddles could be solved only by someone with detailed knowledge of Islamic positive law (furūʿ), and he argues that they are both an appropriate form of restful entertainment and a kind of competitive pedagogy. At the same time, Ibn Farḥūn derived novel legal opinions on the basis of his riddles, which demonstrates that jurists used hypothetical, imaginative situations to derive new rulings. The article also traces the origins of furūʿ -based legal riddles in the more diffuse tradition of Islamic riddling and in the adab tradition of riddling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This review proposes that the recursivity of law offers a promising framework for sociolegal and interdisciplinary research on global norm-making. The recursivity approach is systematic, generates hypotheses and questions about global actors and mechanisms, takes seriously historical contingency, and is inherently comparative across issue areas and different levels of governance. In global lawmaking, recursivity proceeds principally through the intersection of three interacting cycles of global normmaking, national lawmaking, and the interaction between the two. With particular focus on genocide and war crimes, violence against women, trade law, and climate change, the review demonstrates how four mechanisms--actor mismatch, diagnostic struggles, contradictions, and indeterminacy--drive forward these cycles of reform until the inherent tensions within them are resolved and normmaking settles. A sociolegal approach to the recursivity of global normmaking emphasizes (a) the politics of the legal complex, (b) the constitutive power of legal concepts, (c) the structure and dynamics of global regulatory institutions, and (d) the formal properties of global law. The review concludes with generalizations about global normmaking and particularly promising topics for sociolegal scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]