The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization)

EAN: 9781107157637
Published 27/10/2016
Language: English

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire endured long periods of warfare, facing intense financial pressures and new international mercantile and monetary trends. The Empire also experienced major political-administrative restructuring and socioeconomic transformations. In the context of this tumultuous change, The Economics of Ottoman Justice examines Ottoman legal practices and the sharia court's operations to reflect on the judicial system and provincial relationships. Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene provide a systematic depiction of socio-legal interactions, identifying how different social, economic, gender and religious groups used the court, how they settled their disputes, and which factors contributed to their success at trial. Using an economic approach, Coşgel and Ergene offer rare insights into the role of power differences in judicial interactions, and into the reproduction of communal hierarchies in court, and demonstrate how court use patterns changed over time.

Introduction
Part I. Methodology and Background
1. Quantitative approaches in research on Ottoman legal practice
2. Kastamonu
the town and its people
Part II. The Court and Court Clients
3. The court, its actors, and its archive
4. Court use
a preliminary analysis
Part III. To Settle or Not to Settle
5. Dispute resolution in Ottoman courts of law
6. Trial vs settlement
an economic approach
7. Which disputes went to trial? Case-type- and period-based analyses
Part IV. Litigations
8. Rules and tools of litigation
9. Economics of litigation
what affects success at trial?
10. Who won? Case-type- and period-based analyses
Conclusion.