Soazick Kerneis

Soazick Kerneis is Professor of legal history at the University of Paris-Nanterre and Director of the Centre of History and Legal Anthropology (EA 4417). 

Her research is focused on Europe's legal roots. It is about the Inheritance of 'Roman law' and challenges the concept of custom, as the legal vulgate has disseminated it. To grasp the importance of Rome's legacy and to understand its diversity, she tries to emphasise the process of acculturation from the life of law in Western provinces. Popular sources like judicial prayers, engraved tiles or wooden tablets show the intertwining between popular practices and Roman law and the impact of legal hybridisation in the development of law. 
It is perhaps at that very moment and in this popular context that beyond the Roman ius blossomed up a late directum that framed the European laws (droits).

Working on the hybridisation of norms in the late Roman Empire, she paid attention to the development of alternative procedures able to accommodate imperial justice and justice of the invisible. This very first step grabbed her interest in the current practice of alternative dispute resolution from a historical and anthropological perspective. Paying tribute to Raymond Verdier’s research on ordeal in Africa, she wrote different papers on the birth or ordeal in the late Roman Empire in the context or a Roman military justice applied to the Barbarian soldiers. 
A new part of her research deals with the legal issues caused by witchcraft. A lot has already been said about witchcraft, but one field of knowledge is still little explored, that of law, even though the qualification, whether it is French sorcellerie or English witchcraft, and sorcery refers to legal language. The concepts used were invented by academics obsessed with classification and wishing to confine popular practices, which belonged to a different mental universe and were most often perceived negatively, within categories inspired by its way of thinking. Regarded as an anthropological phenomenon, witchcraft appears as the other of the law, the abnormality that the legal norm identifies and intends to correct. Placed in the historical context of colonial history, legal analysis may use the Western concepts of witchcraft and sorcery, which are seen as Western transplants in the context of legal transplantation. One of the challenges of her project is to use these linguistic elements to assess the relationship between law and witchcraft outside of a binary opposition and to consider their dynamics from their invention to their metamorphosis. 

Latest publications
S. Kerneis (éd. ), Une histoire juridique de l’Occident. Le droit et la coutume (IIIe-IXe siècles), PUF, Paris, 2018.
La justice en vérité. Une histoire romaine du dire-vrai, collection Les sens du droit, Dalloz, 2022.