What Can We Learn about Slavery from a Manual for Judges and Notaries?
Introduction This month’s blog post focuses on the relevance that shurūṭ manuals written for judges and notaries have for understanding practices related to slavery, and legal practices more generally. Shurūṭ works, or “model shurūṭ works,” as Wael Hallaq puts it in his seminal article on the topic, are works that reproduce standardised legal contracts or judicial rulings in a range of domains for easy use by legal professionals. The need for this genre arose partly because persons with inadequate knowledge…