ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the lectures given in Rio de Janeiro in 1973 ('Truth and Juridical Forms') and those given in Louvain in 1981. In both sets of lectures Foucault argues that it was in proto-legal or quasi-legal contexts associated with personal avowal that the modern notion of an inquiry developed. The inquiry, in general, is a distinctly modern approach to truth-seeking. In the Louvain lectures Foucault makes a number of fairly well-informed comments about legal and judicial procedures in ancient Greece and in medieval Europe; but the lectures do not amount either to a full history or more importantly for most readers, to a theory of law or a theory of justice. In the Rio lectures, but not in Louvain, Foucault makes a point of connecting the evolution of legal truth mechanisms to broader institutional trends, in particular the rise of centralized, royal courts of justice and the emergence of a figure 'without precedent in Roman law, the prosecutor'.
