المجتمعات البدائية و القديمة شرائعها و دور السوابق القضائية فيها

Abstract EN

The divine religions agree that almighty god has placed Adam on earth and made the earth his homeland until the Day of Judgment.

God created human being to love the gathering (meeting) and the first seed of gathering is the family, which started with the union of couples who god brought them together based on love and mercy and granted them with boys and girls.

Gradually, families who have common parenthood came together in groups and most of the theories agree that the groups in the era of pre-history were separate with few individuals in each group, but differ in what was the link between them, as some believe it is the family link while others think the link was the common worshiping.

The nature of life required this type of gathering.

They lived nomadic life depending solely on hunting for their living but as soon as they learned the farming, they got familiar with stability and the groups started to gather in villages and compounds.

With the merge of chalcolithic age, multiple societies were formed and interaction of interests both internally and externally started among them.

As the problems increased, there was a necessity for a deterrent because they suffered a lot from the jungle law and the logic of the more powerful.

They had to appeal to the rules of behavior, accepted by the people and added with some sacredness by the religions.

They went to arbitration among themselves voluntarily, which later became compulsory (mandatory).

Then, they referred to the priests who were detecting the view of god.

They felt the necessity of matching up the rules in the similar issues as they repeated over.

Thus, they established judicial precedents, which later turned into customs and laid out compulsory punishments and penalties posed by a certain authority in order to be deterrent to crimes and oppression and to achieve justice, which is the main principle of religions and laws of nature.

The law was like this in the era of pre-history as there is least information on that era.

With the learning of writing, they started to write down those customs and collect them in legal collections and that was in the historic ages.

After the merge of writing and life development in all aspects, the history recorded to us the events of those ages.

It appeared that the legislations of nations were of enough mature and advance especially in the ancient Iraqi and roman civilizations.

The Hammurabis law code and Roman laws did not only left traces on their ages but also influenced the succeeding ages and neighboring nations.

Additionally, it has left traces on the modern laws.

Thus, it is of importance to do research on the sources of laws to understand the nature of legislations and easily compare between the old and new laws.

One of those key sources of law is the judicial precedents.

The judicial precedents are the source of law that had deeper roots than its links to a nation or historic era.

The researchers often link the judicial precedent to the Anglo-Saxon civilization, which is unfair because its roots extend to the depths of history, and both eastern and western civilization contributed into it as proved in the history by the evidences and documents found in the Babylon and other civilizations.

The judicial precedents were also the source for Roman laws that entered the French laws through the Justinian collections.

It is important to know the law basis because the source of the law gives legitimacy to it and is values based on the fact if it is formal source or interpretation.

Nevertheless, the legislations differ in referring to sources and giving them superiority.