Compare Today's Legal System To The Code Of Hammurabi

Between 1792 and 1750 B.C.E., Hammurabi was an emperor of Mesopotamia. Hammurabi had a great army when he was emperor and was able to keep his empire strong. He had such great war tactics that he was able to gain control of Sumer and Akkad once again and reunite Mesopotamia to almost exactly how it was under Sargon. Not only was he good at war tactics, but he was good at keeping peace among his people. He made sure to make sure Sumerian ways would continue to exist. Hammurabi came up with a set of 282 laws and called them The Code of Hammurabi. The code provided punishments and laws that were found reasonable to people based on their class level and gender. This was to help people see their place in society and set a way for people to solve …show more content…
In the Code of Hammurabi if an upper-class citizen does something wrong against a lower class citizen they would get a less severe punishment than if a lower class citizen were to do the same thing to the upper-class citizen. In Today’s system, it works almost in the same way if you have more money you tend to get away with what you do that if you are poorer. In today’s legal system the government sets the wages for jobs like labors, Hammurabi’s Code did the same thing. This is impressive to see because even back then people understood that there needed to be a set wage for workers to make things fair. Another similarity is that when two people got married they had to sign a contract. Though today it is rare to have a couple sign a contract when they get married unless they are very rich. Under Hammurabi’s Code two people were not allowed to get married at all unless the contract was signed, this rule could still be followed by certain families in today’s system but is not required. When it comes to the builders being responsible for what they build under The Hammurabi Code it somewhat is similar to what the builders are responsible for in today’s system. Today builders are required to make sure that everything is built perfect and stable so that nothing ends up collapsing. Like The Code of Hammurabi if a building were to collapse the builders were found at fault. Though the builders aren’t put to death if someone dies, they would get sued and possibly go out of business. Like the Code of Hammurabi women and men are allowed to get divorced today but they have to have a good reason for the divorce. The Code of Hammurabi can be seen as a stepping stone for today’s laws because many things have been adopted in society