This chapter looks at the legal texts from ancient Greece and Crete and connections they may share with biblical law. The Greek laws offer rich comparative material for legal problems in a geographically and culturally adjacent area and contribute to a better understanding of the social interactions and administrative structures in and around the Mediterranean.

European integration is in crisis. Paradoxically, disintegration seems to be a transnational tendency. While one cannot say that proportionality bears the dynamics of disintegration itself, relevant tendencies affect its form and function in different settings. This chapter offers a particular reading of proportionality cases that have provoked much discussion among French, English and Greek legal actors. I argue that what is new about these cases is not so much the application of proportionality itself, which follows already existing local patterns characterising the reception and the evolution of proportionality. Rather, it is the particular context of disintegration in which proportionality operates. Indeed, what is observed in these much debated uses of proportionality is a rupture in the traditional local patterns of Europeanisation.

This chapter provides a comparative study of the application of proportionality by English and Greek judges in the field of EC market freedoms. It shows that both English and Greek judges have assumed their mission of juges communautaires de droit commun. Despite this appearance of convergence, I argue, the reception of proportionality follows local patterns of cultural change and local knowledge practices, which affect local lawyers’ possibilities to resist to the process of European integration, as well as their capacity shape this process. Common law pragmatism has allowed English courts to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. When proportionality and the effet utile of EC market freedoms entered into conflict with fundamental constitutional principles of the common law, English judges have occasionally objected to their application. By way of contrast, the perception of law as science has not allowed Greek lawyers to frame normative conflicts between domestic and EC law. Proportionality as a European science has engineered important constitutional change and has considerably compromised the normativity of the Greek Constitution.

This chapter examines the distinctions made between slaves and free persons in Greek law, politics, religion and civic ideology. It also explores the ways that slaves subverted these distinctions in everyday life and thereby exposes their artificiality.