Inspired by this thread, are there any good resources to understand the practical, day-to-day law of Native groups before European contact, especially groups like the Incas or Aztecs that lived in cities and had complex social structures? E.g. I’m thinking about definitions of criminal offenses (e.g. was DUI illegal? Were there any controlled substances that were entirely illegal or that required a doctor’s prescription?), criminal procedure (did you have a right to counsel in the Inca Empire?), regulation of professions (e.g. how did you become a qualified bricklayer?), educational law/criteria for formal educational qualifications, traffic regulation (e.g. stay on the left side and give way to Government processions), immigration regulations (e.g. that Mayan guy was SO not getting Aztec citizenship because…)
The Inca didn’t have a written language unless you’re one of the people accepting khipu knots as a written language. Even if you do, no one has translated them into anything as complex as legal code. The Spanish made no attempt to preserve Inca culture so anything as complicated as law are lost to time.
True for the Inca, but not for the Aztecs.
We know a thing or two about the Aztec legal system, such as that “punishments for public intoxication, theft, adultery and other social deviances were severe and usually entailed stoning,” and “ordinarily intoxication was prohibited in Aztec society, but once a man or woman had reached the age of seventy, they were entitled to imbibe at their leisure, after a life of self-less toil.” (Cite.)
This second homepage goes so far as to saying that “perhaps no culture in history has ever set up more rigid barriers against this danger,” i.e. alcoholism, and goes into the details.
This third homepage deals with Aztec crime and punishment generally – I’ll admit I have only skimmed it, but here are some details: Laws differed from city to city; "regarding marriage, a man could have as many concubines as he wished, but only descendants of his original wife could inherit his estate; “divorce was allowed in certain situations, but the woman would get half of the couple’s assets, and was free to re marry”; slavery was a form of punishment, as was exile and restitution; “even minor theft would be punished with death,” etc.
You asked about citizenship rights. The Aztecs, who bulit up a trading empire with colonies and tribute-paying subject peoples, were one thing I won’t get into here.
But Teotihuacan, a central Mexican city whose glory days were several centuries before the Aztecs, seems to have been a polyglot commercial center, where peoples of varying origins apparently lived together more or less peacefully – probably an exception to the general Precolumbian rule of mistrust, if not outright hostility, to other tribes and polities.
I presume without a fairly widely circulated writing, the problem always boils down to “what is the law”? Either there’s a recited list that everyone knows (like the 10 commandments) or else law takes the form of adversarial justice - if someone is offended, they take their case to what passes for a maoistrate, usually the local ruler or his minion. Presumably some cases are obvious social transgressions, like murder, and some are more civil suits - “he owes me two llamas!”. The ruler decides based on what seems fair, or what keeps the peace.
We see hints of this adversary approach in the bible - the passage that is often quoted to say the bible approves of abortion, appears to say that inducing a miscarriage is an offense that carries a fine - I presume this means the offending party owes the offended party a debt, not a fine to the king or temple? Paying the fines pays the debt owed the victim that was created by the offense. These early written laws were simply an effort to create a precedent system so that the same justice was given to everyone, to assure fairness.
So had Inca or Aztec society progressed to the same point as some european societies, where a criminal offense was seen as a transgression against the monarch rather than an adversarial offense to be brought forward by the offended or his family?
@md2000 From my second link:
Also, about restitution:
This deals with the Aztecs, don’t know about the rest.