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 The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, and earned a master's degree in law from the

Hebrew University The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI; ) is an Israeli public research university based in Jerusalem. Co-founded by Albert Einstein and Chaim Weizmann in July 1918, the public university officially opened on 1 April 1925. It is the second-ol ...

. He studied

Assyriology Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logia''), also known as Cuneiform studies or Ancient Near East studies, is the archaeological, anthropological, historical, and linguistic study of the cultures that used cuneiform writing. The fie ...

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 The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...

, 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