Series Editors’ Preface

The name of Jean Bodin is not traditionally featured in the canon of legal scholarship as prominently as it is amongst the classics of political theory. One of the reasons for this disciplinary exile, as Daniel Lee puts it, is “the simple fact that he gave up” as a lawyer. While Bodin may have indeed failed to pursue a legal career, the legal implications of his theories are undeniable. Over years of research on such implications, Daniel Lee has successfully removed Bodin from his legal exile. Lee’s extensive engagement with Bodin’s legal theory is further witnessed by his monograph The Right of Sovereignty, published in 2021 in this very same series. This book is the first English translation of Bodin’s Iuris Universi Distributio, “A Division of Law as a Whole.” It was published in 1578, two years after his most famous Les Six Livres de la République (“Six Books on the State”). Daniel Lee’s three initial chapters serve as a robust introduction to the text, translated into English (elegantly and astutely) by Jason Aaron Brown. A thorough and informative Translator’s Preface guides the reader through the editorial choices, syntactic difficulties, and semantic oscillations encountered in the translation process. An inherently visual and pedagogical project, Bodin’s Distributio sets the foundations for a universal jurisprudence. According to a well-known intellectual tradition, deriving from Roman law and stretching all the way to contemporary studies of comparative international law, the law of nations has an essentially comparative flavor. The laws of the world can be derived by comparing and collecting the laws of the different peoples inhabiting it.