Raymond Westbrook
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Raymond Westbrook (1946– 23 July 2009) was a scholar of the legal systems of the ancient Near East. He was born in England.


Education

Westbrook studied law at the
University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...
, and earned a master's degree in law from the
Hebrew University The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; he, הַאוּנִיבֶרְסִיטָה הַעִבְרִית בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם) is a public university, public research university based in Jerusalem, Israel. Co-founded by Albert Einstein ...
. He studied
Assyriology Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , '' -logia'') is the archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia (a region that encompassed what is now modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southe ...
at Yale, and then practised and taught law in England and Wales before finishing his dissertation in 1982 entitled ''Old Babylonian Marriage Law'', for which Yale awarded him the Ph.D.


Career

Westbrook was a scholar of ancient Near Eastern law. Westbrook was a lawyer. Westbrook was a lecturer in law and biblical studies from 1983 to 1987. Westbrook then joined the faculty of
Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
, where he served until his death, at which time he held an endowed chair at Hopkins: the W.W. Spence Professor in Semitic Languages in the Department of Near Eastern Studies in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. He wrote or edited books on topics of the law in the ancient Near East, becoming a scholar on this topic until his death from cancer in 2009 at age 62. Many of his writings are collected in the posthumous two volume work: ''Law from the Tigris to the Tiber The Writings of Raymond Westbrook''. He wrote a two-volume reference, "The History of Ancient Near Eastern Law," a 1,200 page, tome which he edited, in addition to writing about 200 pages on his own. He contributed in free seminars. He also produced a bibliography of his subject.Raymond Westbrook, ''Law in the Ancient World: Model Syllabus and Sources''


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Westbrook, Raymond Johns Hopkins University faculty English historians Alumni of the University of Oxford Hebrew University of Jerusalem alumni 1946 births 2009 deaths