Table des matières

• The blank point in contemporary historical research
• Adjudication in light of judicial decision making
• How court narratives work: the benefits and limits of case analysis
• Significance of the general rules
• Organization of the book

• Beginnings
• The coherence of speech and the fiction of an unfolding madhhab
• The ambiguity of pre-modern discourses
• “Customary law” and the fiction of legal change
• Custom within the perspective of law and economics
• Change with the make-belief that it all conforms to tradition
• The linguistic roots of custom
• From customs to fatwas and beyond
• The marginalization of law
• Custom becoming law

• The enterprise of judging between cases and texts
• The procedural fictions conundrum
• The culture of judges
• The diwan of the qadi and his sijills

• The predominance of status contracts in agrarian societies
• Limitations of Hanafi contracts
• The economics of contracts
• What an economics of contracts implies
• A typical contract of sale
• A general theory of contracts?
• Can prices be fair?
• The language of contracts
• Bypassing the rigidity of tenancy contracts
• The benefits of sharecropping
• Sharing the rent
• Rent and its self-correcting practices
• Excursus on marriage
• Tenancy from the canonical texts to the court practices
• Towards an objectivism in contractual practices
• The insidiousness of low rents

• Counterfactual juristic discourse
• Judicial decision making and procedural fictions
• The self-transcending power of discourse
• Looking for signs of landownership: the ambiguities of rent and tax
• Genealogy of a legal fiction
• Keeping one’s hand over a property
• Rebutting a case
• Interpreting the past: “Feudal” variations

• The Maronitism of the Shihabs
• Maronite law
• Representations of non-Muslims
• Family disputes
• The wives of Bashir II
• Women, property, and murder
• The litigants and their representatives
• The “debt”
• The inheritance
• Analysis and syntax
• The outside
• Two litigations into one single case
• A specific ruling
• Unchallenged narratives

• The economics of waqfs
• Validating waqfs through routinized procedural fictions
• The origins of the “three-founders” technique
• Debts, contracts, and the status of waqfs

• Unlawful usurpation and property restitution
• How fatwas work
• Excursus: English common law

• The grammars of waqfs
• A ratio decidendi?
• What the founder said
• Property rights versus contractual rights
• The grammars of “privacy” and filiations
• An older case
• Property claims and rights
• A legitimate narrative
• The use of language
• How “cases” are constructed
• Status and authority of the text

• A plea for mercy
• Family intrigues
• Which labor laws?
• When courts and councils met

• Usury without name
• The technique of equalization

• Fiction is the perfect crime
• The tool-of-killing as corpus delicti
• Findings of fact
• The body, its parts, and their value
• Weapon determines intent
• Value of the body and its parts
• Kinship settlements
• Blood-money payments
• The perfect crime
• Pre-trial settlements
• Crime settlements metamorphosing into contracts
• The murderous triangle and the cycle of debt
• Hard cases
• The murderer, his kin, and blood money
• The victim vanished
• The “public” jurisdiction of the regional councils over criminal procedures
• The economics of crime
• The objectivism—or formalism—in decision making
• The phantom of the victim and the cycle of debt

Annexes

• Acknowledgments

• VOL. 1: religious rituals
• VOL. 2: mostly religious rituals
• VOL. 3: marriage and divorce
• VOL. 4: punishments and pecuniary transactions
• VOL. 5: pecuniary transactions
• VOL. 6: transactions & homicides
• VOL. 7: transactions
• VOL. 8: transactions

• Part one
• Part two