The Santillana Codes: The Civil Codes of Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania

(Hardback)

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This book examines the Santillana Codes, legal instruments which form a distinct class of uniquely African civil codes and which are still in force today in a legal arc that extends from the Maghreb to the Sahel. Stigall presents the history of Santillanas seminal legislative effort and provides a comparative analysis of the substance of those codes, illuminating commonalities between Islamic law and European legal systems.

Reviews

The Santillana Codes: The Civil Codes of Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania succeeds in inviting more jurisdictions to the codification table. It likewise fills a gap in the English-language literature on the codification endeavors undertaken in the Maghreb, focusing on the interplay of civil law and Islamic law. * Journal of Civil Law Studies *
This book provides an excellent comparative in-depth study of how the civil legal tradition and the Islamic legal tradition interact in the context of a code. The book demonstrates in an innovative and thought-provoking way that Islamic law can indeed function well in a contemporary context side-by-side the civil legal tradition as a part of a "mixed-law jurisdiction," where a variety of sources contribute to the domestic legal system.I see this book as a truly remarkable contribution to a variety of scholarly disciplines, including comparative law and Islamic law in particular. -- Emilia Justyna Powell, University of Notre Dame
In an innovative, historical, conceptual, and analytical thesis of the codification movement in Tunisia, Morocco, and Mauritania, Dan Stigall makes a valuable contribution to the areas of comparative law, civil law, Islamic law, and the Middle Eastern legal systems. -- Mohamed Mattar, Qatar University, College of Law
Part history of North Africa and the Sahel, part ethnography, and fully a text in comparative law. This book recovers the memory and introduces the work of the Middle Eastern and African legislators who labored on connecting the civilian legal tradition to Islamic law. The approach is highly recommended in a world which is increasingly skeptical of attempts to reconstruct Middle Eastern or African societies from a tabula rasa. -- David E. Zammit, University of Malta

Author Bio

Dan E. Stigall is an attorney with the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.