'Who hates the law and why? A comparative perspective

Ever since Aristotle, scholars have been wary of the law and concerned about the injustice that it can produce. Cicero expressed it as ‘the more law, the less justice’ and James Whitman describes a ‘hatred’ of Roman law (in particular) among much later European scholars. In very different legal traditions, too, scholars have also been wary of the law – Whitman mentions Confucius and recent Islamic legal scholars, in this regard. But are their attitudes really comparable with those of the classical and post-classical European lawyers? In this presentation I ask what this ‘hatred’ amounted to, and what these negative attitudes can tell us about how people in these different traditions thought their law ought to be and what it was for.