This chapter investigates the nature of the relations between the rules of professional associations and the shaping of community values in early Roman Egypt.

The abundance of private and voluntary associations was a key characteristic of the Roman world, in the West and in the East, during the late Republic and the High Empire.1 Most of the time, those communities were called collegia, corpora or sodalicia and their social recruitment was rooted in the urban plebs, the plebeians.2 From a certain point of view, they were very diverse. Indeed, their specific names suggested that their members decided to unite for different reasons: because they had the same occupation, the same geographical origin or the same devotion to a specific god, for instance. Nevertheless, they were usually engaged in very similar activities. All of them were religious associations.

Associations were variably anchored in space and place.1 Being active in different spheres of life, associations carved their own space into the urban fabric or in the countryside to accommodate their multifaceted activities. Associations were emplaced in civic, sacred and funerary space, enriching and expanding it through their dedicatory, honorific, religious and commemorative practices.2 In these respects, their activities informed the built environment, which in turn framed social interaction.

The final chapter draws out the implications of this study of constitutional embedding for how citizens access to social goods around the world and how scholars ought to study constitutional law and legal mobilization. Though not without important limits, the introduction of social constitutionalism to Colombia has resulted in tangible material gains for many citizens and generated new possibilities for citizens to contest the conditions of their lives.

Obviously, this is not the place to argue about the impact of the description on Demosthenes’ rhetorical strategy.2 The passage is significant in another, rather neglected, respect. It reflects the ambience created by these kaloi thiasoi, ‘brilliant groups’, an atmosphere of hustle and buzzes. It is exactly this sense of thorybos conveyed by the passage that interests me. Similar thorybos may be behind the decision of the deme of Piraeus to ban groups of worshippers convening outside the Thesmophorion in Piraeus, except on certain festival days.3 Thorybos (that is, cheers, shouts, heckling and laughter) was an essential feature of social activity in the ancient Greek world. Quite apart the religious sphere, several scholars emphasised the role of thorybos in the working of Athenian democracy, in the assembly and in the lawcourts.4 Judith Tacon claims that thorybos (that is, cases when speakers interrupt each other, demos interrupts speakers, demos allies with opposing speakers) was an integral feature of assembly debate and by extension of Athenian democracy. Anti-democracy theorists regarded it as negative.

Chapter 7 focuses on overt, political efforts to confront social constitutionalism and unravel rights protections. Following the introduction of the 1991 Constitution, established elites within the judiciary, the executive, and the legislature bristled at the changing political and legal landscape. They attempted to stymie those changes in various ways, primarily seeking to disempower the newly created Constitutional Court and limit the newly created tutela procedure. The popularity of the Constitutional Court and the tutela procedure – and continued legal mobilization using the tutela procedure – however, meant that these efforts to dislodge social constitutionalism in Colombia failed.

One of the most often repeated facts about ancient associations seems to be that they were imitating the state. Even a cursory reading of scholarly literature reveals a number of concise definitions. Associations were ‘cités en miniature’, ‘mirror-images of the city on an organizational level’, they ‘posed as little republic[s]’ – the list could be continued.1 And the main insight is of course correct. The designations for officials, the delineation of sacred space, the formulae of honorific decrees, voting procedures – all these elements were regularly taken over by associations from the model provided by their respective cities.

1 scholars have traditionally opted for units of study comprising distinct cultural and political entities, such as ‘Classical Greek,’ ‘Hellenistic,’ or ‘Roman’ associations. Occasionally, though, Greek and Roman traditions for associating have been treated as an implicit case of Mediterranean institutional unity, constituting one overarching fenomeno associativo, ‘associational phenomenon’.2 Thus, particularly the older historiography of the subject reflects this basic premise of wider Greco-Roman institutional connectedness and compatibility, in that even though the two subjects are most often dealt with separately, they are assumed to add up to a mutually coherent framework for interpreting one or the other or both.

Chapter 8 turns to the labor of law, or the difficulty of keeping up with the daily work that underpins this legal order. While Constitutional Court judges have garnered substantial attention, lower-court judges are tasked with the majority of the work of social constitutionalism in Colombia. They are the ones who have reviewed each of the nearly eight million tutela claims that have been filed since 1992. Many of these lower-court judges report that they feel overworked and underresourced. Material and normative pressures, thus far, have combined to ensure that these judges continue to keep up with the labor of social constitutionalism.

This chapter proposes to look in some detail at a few evocative cases, primarily from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, where associations or other groups, such as bands of worshippers, were especially concerned with purity or where they published inscribed rules of purity.1 Limited in number partly due to the vicissitudes of epigraphic preservation, partly due to the geographic and chronological specificities of this material – post-Classical Asia Minor and the Aegean – other factors may also explain their scarcity and warrant further investigation.

Chapter 5 explores legal embedding in Colombia. It tracks why and how Colombian judges – both at the Constitutional Court level and the lower court level – came to be receptive to the new constitutional order, especially claims through the tutela procedure, even when those claims appeared to be beyond its formal scope. The combination of repeated exposure to particular kinds of legal claims in the formal legal sphere and exposure to the problems those claims implicate in everyday life seems to drive judicial receptivity. Judges are particularly receptive to claims when they interpret them as consonant with contemporary socio-legal values.

Chapter 9 extends the argument of this book to the case of the 1996 South African Constitution, demonstrating the usefulness of examining the contours and limits of constitutional embeddedness beyond the Colombian context. The South African case is one of partial constitutional embedding, where legal embedding significantly outpaced social embedding. This comparative examination probes different ways in which constitutional embedding can occur in practice, and it helps to show how constitutional embedding is not a necessary or inevitable phenomenon.