Law Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
Grouped by the shape of the gap rather than its subject: what sort of thing is unresolved.
interpretive 2
Recorded as unresolved.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
Has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become binding customary international law?
Open Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)
Why It Is Open The Declaration was adopted as a non-binding General Assembly resolution and was never opened for state ratification, so it does not bind states as a treaty does. Many scholars and some international tribunals argue that widespread and consistent state practice treating parts of the Declaration as binding has since elevated at least some of its provisions, such as the prohibitions on torture and slavery, into customary international law, but there is no single authoritative determination of exactly which articles have crossed that threshold and which remain aspirational.
What Would Settle It A consensus multilateral determination or a sustained line of consistent international judicial holdings expressly ruling on the customary status of each individual article, which does not currently exist in a single settled form.
Expertise Needed Public international law
Question posed in
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Separation of Powers
How consistently should the six Baker v Carr factors be weighed when a federal court decides whether an issue is a nonjusticiable political question?
Open Separation of Powers
Why It Is Open Cornell Law School's own Legal Information Institute entry records that the political question doctrine's own application is inconsistent and difficult, invoked far more readily in foreign-affairs cases than in domestic ones; no single weighting of the six Baker factors has commanded lasting agreement among courts or scholars, and the Supreme Court itself has never definitively resolved which factor or combination of factors controls.
What Would Settle It A Supreme Court decision squarely addressing how the six Baker factors interact, or a sustained scholarly consensus reconciling the doctrine's own inconsistent domestic and foreign-affairs application, would settle the question; neither exists today.
Expertise Needed Constitutional law; comparative separation-of-powers scholarship
Question posed in
Political Question Doctrine (Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School), Application.
attribution 1
Who said or wrote or made something, where the record is incomplete.
Hittite Laws
Who promulgated the Hittite Laws: a named king, an anonymous royal court, or some other authority the surviving tablets do not record?
Open Hittite Laws
Why It Is Open The surviving Hittite Laws tablets do not name an author or promulgating authority. Some historians infer the source was someone of high rank in Hittite society, possibly a king, but this is scholarly inference rather than an attested statement in the text itself.
What Would Settle It A Hittite royal inscription, colophon, or independent Hittitological source naming the specific king or court that issued the laws would resolve this; absent that, the promulgator may simply be unrecoverable from the surviving record.
Expertise Needed Hittitology / Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Question posed in
Hittite Laws (Wikipedia), Authorship section.
Classification 1
Recorded as unresolved.
Civil Law
Is Socialist Law a Distinct Legal Family, or a Variant of the Civil Law Tradition?
Open Civil Law
Why It Is Open Comparativists have never fully settled this. Rene David's influential classification treated socialist law (the historical Soviet system and its export to Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere) as a family of its own, defined by the subordination of law to Communist Party policy and state ownership, even though its courts, codes and legal vocabulary were built on a civil-law base. Zweigert and Kotz, working from a different comparative method, are more skeptical that this political fact by itself creates a distinct legal FAMILY rather than a civil-law variant under unusual political conditions, and post-1989 practice complicates the question further: China's law today keeps socialist characteristics in name while its commercial and procedural codes converge heavily with mainstream civil law.
What Would Settle It A comparative-law consensus classification would need to specify which feature is doing the definitional work, legal FORM (codes, courts, procedure, which stayed civil-law in shape) or POLITICAL FUNCTION (subordination to party policy, which did not), since the two point to different answers; a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction study tracking how far post-1989 codes have converged with ordinary civil law would also narrow the question for any single country.
Question posed in
An Introduction to Comparative Law, Konrad Zweigert and Hein Koetz; English translation by Tony Weir.
historiographical 1
Recorded as unresolved.
Code of Manu (Manusmriti)
Was the Manusmriti Ever Actually Administered as Law in Pre-Colonial India?
Open Code of Manu (Manusmriti)
Why It Is Open Scholars disagree on whether the Manusmriti was ever actually administered as binding law by a pre-colonial Hindu state, or whether it was always an aspirational, idealized ethical treatise. David Buxbaum wrote that it does not represent a set of rules ever actually administered in India and is in great part an ideal picture, and no historical evidence has been shown of any Hindu kingdom systematically enforcing its provisions. The question is sharpened by the text's own instability, with over fifty inconsistent manuscript versions surviving, and by the fact that its status as law was substantially the product of British colonial administrators, who from 1794 treated it as a legal code for their own administrative purposes and used it to construct Anglo-Hindu personal law.
What Would Settle It A documented pre-colonial judicial record or royal decree citing Manusmriti provisions as the operative rule of decision, independent of the later colonial-era Anglo-Hindu law tradition, would show the text was administered as law rather than read as ethical instruction.
Expertise Needed Legal History
Question posed in
Manusmriti (Wikipedia), Role as Legal-Religious Code section.
textual 1
Recorded as unresolved.
The Twelve Tables
What was the exact original wording of the Twelve Tables?
Open The Twelve Tables
Why It Is Open No physical copy of the Twelve Tables survives from antiquity. The text used by modern scholars is a reconstruction assembled from quotations, paraphrases and references scattered across later Roman authors, chiefly Cicero, writing centuries after the original enactment, so both the exact wording and, for some provisions, their original order and grouping into ten versus twelve tables remain uncertain.
What Would Settle It Discovery of a surviving inscribed copy or a substantially earlier manuscript source than the extant citation chain, which no philological effort applied to the existing citations alone can supply.
Expertise Needed Classical philology and Roman legal history
Question posed in
The Avalon Project, Yale Law School.