Adriaan Lanni (Harvard Law School)
First-Year Seminar 31P | Fall Term | Tuesday, 3:00–5:00 PM
Enrollment limited to 12 | CANVAS SITE
Prerequisites: Prior knowledge of ancient history or ancient languages is not required; all readings are in translation and the seminar is designed to be of interest to those without a background in the ancient world.
In classical Athens, litigants represented themselves before hundreds of jurors who rendered verdicts without instruction from a judge. We will evaluate Athens’ distinctively amateur legal system by reading surviving court speeches involving homicide, assault, adultery, international law, and commerce, as well as Plato’s account of Socrates’ defense speech. We will analyze the speeches as pieces of legal rhetoric and for the insight they offer into ancient approaches to crime and punishment, the regulation of sexuality, the trial jury, and court procedure. Taught by a law professor, the focus will be on comparing ancient and modern approaches to problems faced by all legal systems. We will use the ancient material as a jumping off point to debate modern legal topics such as the role of victims in the criminal process, jury nullification, the proper exercise of discretion in prosecution and sentencing, the provocation doctrine in modern homicide law, transitional justice institutions (human rights prosecutions, amnesties, truth commissions); theories of punishment, the use of collective sanctions in international law, free speech and the protection of dissent in a democratic society, and direct vs. representative models of democracy. Approximately half of each class session will be devoted to discussing the Athenian cases, the other half to discussing analogs in modern legal debates.