In Rome, quite unlike Athens, there grew up a professional class of lawyers. These 'jurists' were originally priests, but in the course of the third century BC they came to profess a secular jurisprudence. Their role in the Roman legal system was pivotal: neither the magistrates responsible for granting legal remedies nor the judges who decided cases were lawyers; all looked to the jurists for ...

Muslim physicians and Islamic jurists analyze the moral dimensions of biomedicine using different tools and processes. While the deliberations of these two classes of experts involve judgments about the deliverables of the other’s respective fields, Islamic jurists and Muslim physicians rarely engage in discussions about the constructs and epistemic frameworks that motivate their analyses. The ...

Paul Power’s new book, Intent in Islamic Law, is a challenging and welcome addition to contemporary scholarship on Islamic law and comparative law. Powers examines the way in which the classical Islamic jurists thought about motive, how they thought motive could be identified, and how they thought an actor’s “intent” affected the “legality” of his actions. To accomplish his task, Powers compare...

This study analyzes the conception of gharar , which is generally translated as either risk or uncertainty, in post-formative Islamic commercial law. According to Muslim jurists, gharar arises from uncertainty in commercial transactions. However, unlike other areas of the Islamic intellectual tradition in which uncertainty engenders errors, the uncertainty associated with gharar enables jurists...