My goal after graduating from GVSU is to go to law school and become a lawyer, I am of course interested in anything that has to do with law and politics. I am always interested in learning new things about our laws, but I have never really thought the laws of the past. When I read the section, in the Reilly text, about Hammurabi’s code I was very interested. It is amazing to think that almost four thousand years ago the first laws were being written, but it is not surprising because the first cities where emerging then too. When there are large populations of people living close together there is a need for structure and leadership. Hammurabi lead his people by creating the first laws and keep a relative amount of peace.
Some of Hammurabi’s laws are fairly obvious for example, “If a man has taken a wife and has not executed a marriage contract, that woman is not a wife.” That same idea is still a law today and makes sense still. There is a law in the Code that says if you break into a house you will be put to death and buried in front of that house. Well, that law does not make one sense to me and is thankfully not a law today. If someone were to break into my house, I do not think they deserve to die for it and I certainly do not want them buried in front of my house either. Then there are a lot of Hammurabi’s law that are irrelevant today, for example the laws about slaves.
It is crazy to think that some of the laws that govern our everyday lives were written thousands of years ago. It shows how important laws are for our society to function civilly. It shows that the past, history, still impacts our lives greatly. Even history from thousands of years ago still can teach us a lot
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