Introduction

Summary

When Michael Gagarin and I first met in Berkeley in the mid-1970s, we were the only two scholars (both at the very beginning of our careers) in the United States who thought of their academic specialization as “Greek law.” At that time Douglas MacDowell was the only British scholar with such an established specialization. In other words, the study of Greek legal history was a largely continental European enterprise, and it was traditionally dominated by German, and secondarily French and Italian scholars. The composition of the contributors to this volume testifies to the dramatic changes to this field of study in the last twenty-five years. This is due to a variety of factors, including the decline in interest in most areas of pre-modern legal history in countries such as Germany that were once the bedrock of the discipline, as well as the marked increase in interest among British and American scholars. The majority of the contributors to the volume are thus British and American because this is where in recent years there has been the greatest amount of scholarly interest.