ABSTRACT
The Eastern Orthodox churches are not well known for their tradition of canon law. 1 This is in part due to the nature of the tradition itself. Orthodox canon law has never undergone a legal revolution akin to that experienced by Western Europe in the twelfth century, and consequently has never seen the emergence of a significant class of legal professionals, an extensive standing court system, a major academic infrastructure, or a complex rationalized jurisprudence. Even the concept of canon law as an academic discipline or a field of study is difficult to locate in the East before the nineteenth century, and it has never since extended much beyond a handful of professorial chairs. As a result, eastern canonical literature, traditional and modern, is less plentiful than its western counterpart by several orders of magnitude. To an outside observer, the Orthodox canonical system seems to play a comparatively restricted and minor role in Orthodox church life.
