Center for Jewish Studies- Individuals, networks and legal institutions –Networks, either based on hierarchical or horizontal relationships, have received much attention in recent years from both historians of Europe and the Middle East. How do these networks play out within the legal arena? How do litigants employ the connections they might have with judges, jurisconsults or the staff of the court to their benefits, and how institutions in turn use these same networks to guarantee litigants’ participation and compliance? To what degree such networks represent a challenge to the formal buildup of legal institutions?
- The individuals within the legal institutions - Who are the people who staffed the institutions and what can prosopography tell us about institutions? To what degree are the personal interests of these individuals aligned with the interests of the institutions and what happens when they do not align?
- Beyond legal pluralism - In recent years we have witnessed a flurry of studies arguing the centrality of legal pluralism to our understanding of the medieval legal marketplace. On the one hand, it seems like the dividends of legal pluralism have not yet been fully exploited by historians and, on the other hand, there is a growing realization that pluralism is only one aspect of the legal marketplace. Studies challenging, developing or complementing the concept of legal pluralism in the medieval Mediterranean are will be most welcome.
- Legal documents as mediators between individuals and institutions – How institutions produce legal documents and what do individuals do with these documents once produced? What types of power do documents convey and from where does this power emanates?
- Judgments, mediation and arbitration: scholars have noted the paucity of decisive judgments in medieval court records in the Islamic world. How is such paucity to be understood and how does it compare with legal records across the Mediterranean?
