Hammurabi Quotes
If a chieftain or a man leave his house, garden, and field and hires it out, and some one else takes possession of his house, garden, and field and uses it for three years; if the first owner return and claims his house, garden, and field, it shall not be given to him, but he who has taken possession of it and used it shall continue to use it.
Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi. Translated by L. W. King, The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, 2008.
Manava Dharma Shastra. This legal principle is operative in every one of the United States to this day, the only difference being a longer period of time. This text is a part of the Hindu Holy Texts. Hindus believe that Manu was a prophet whose text is revealed or inspired.
Since a slave was not a person, he/she could not accept any gifts or own any property. They were themselves property. The Greeks, the Romans, the ancient Germans, the Poles, with the Portuguese, the Spanish and the French had provided, both by law and by custom, for the possession of property by the slave, which could, not be seized by his master. This is another sense in which American slavery was even worse than most slavery had been.
This was an effort to keep Asian immigrants—who were ineligible for citizenship under the racist Federal laws though the 1930s from competing with American farmers. Many of the Western states also had laws or Constitutions prohibiting Asians to not only own land but also forbidding them from even having long tern leases on land. The Japanese in California were so successful that in the 1920s that state passed a version of Asian land ownership prohibition. The Supreme Court at the time actually ruled that this kind of discrimination was legal. A French alien could own land but not a Japanese. The loophole however was that many Japanese short term tenant farmers who had saved enough money to buy land, had children who were born in the United State and hence where citizens. The land was purchased by the citizen children. California however went so far as to make it illegal for a Japanese person to be a guardian of his minor children if the children were born in the United States, but that law was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Hammurabi (c. 1810 – c. 1750 BC) was the sixth king of the First Babylonian dynasty of the Amorite tribe, reigning from c. 1792 BC to c. 1750 BC (according to the Middle Chronology). He was preceded by his father, Sin-Muballit, who abdicated due to failing health. During his reign, he conquered Elam and the city-states of Larsa, Eshnunna, and Mari. He ousted Ishme-Dagan I, the king of Assyria, and forced his son Mut-Ashkur to pay tribute, bringing almost all of Mesopotamia under Babylonian rule.
