Oral law’s lack of writing prevented codification and lawyerly authority

Evidence

Knowledge of the “adat law” and of its localized implementation precluded the need for a specialized class of people, such as Islamic legal specialists or modern lawyers. It was knowledge of common behavior, individual and communal, and perceived as such in relative terms by those upon whom it is incumbent to conduct themselves in a particular way. In other words, this knowledge did not reside in an elite but was rather diffused in the community, although the elders tended to be particularly regarded as repositories of it. And since it did not require writing, or therefore any “scholarly” commentaries or glosses, no jurists or lawyers could become the locus of either legal or epistemic authority. The preclusion of writing therefore entailed the exclusion of codification, an essential tool of a centralized state authority, and a modern one at that. The adat, therefore, in its natural form and traditional historical evolution depended on the crucial fact of remaining in a state of orality, a state of fluidity and thus malleability. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Mirrors the diamond-trade finding that extralegal systems depend on internalized norms rather than written codification; oral fluidity plays the role of flexible reputation. — connects to: The Restatements descended from the codification movement yet were never binding law — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2358
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense causal chain — orality blocks professional monopoly and codification, which blocks state centralization — that costs real thought to hold together and has broad implications for the technology of social order.
• QUESTION: Does this imply that writing/literacy is a necessary precondition for centralized coercive statehood? Worth chasing the comparative evidence.