Two from Kadens on Custom

Emily Kadens, Northwestern University School of Law (and a former Guest Blogger), has posted two articles on custom.  The first is Custom's Two Bodies, which appears in Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, edited by Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner and Anne E. Lester (Brill 2013) It “introduces a theory of custom as a duality composed of behavior on the one hand and stated legal rules on the other. A behavior-custom is binding law even before it gets articulated as a rule-custom, yet behavior-custom has very different characteristics from custom stated as an express legal rule.”  The second is Introduction: Lessons from the History of Custom, from the Texas International Law Journal 38 (2013).  It “discusses the writings of the medieval and early modern jurists on custom to demonstrate that they could teach us a great deal about understanding how custom really works.”