The lecture is posted by caemgen51 and is presented by Irish historian pat flannery

How much do we really know about brehon law and how far ahead of its time was it?

We know a ton about indigenous Irish law because we have a huge corpus of primary material available, though unfortunately most of it remains untranslated in edited volumes like Binchy's mammoth Corpus iuris Hibernici. Brehon law was based on contractual agreements between individuals who acted as representatives their kin-group called the fine. It categorized men and women into various groupings based on their economic self-sufficiency, their number of clients and gave them an 'honour price' based on the category that they belonged to. An honour price was the quantification of a person's honour derived from their social status, and was used to measure the kinds of tribute they could extract or had to give to others.

Was Brehon law 'ahead of its time'? I don't think you can really qualify systems of law in that way. Irish law did avoid corporal punishment, gave women more rights within marriage and allowed for some measure of social mobility. But these benefits did not derive from the essential progressiveness of Irish law, but the shape and character of early Irish society. Irish law avoided corporal punishment because Ireland's political structures operated through indirect means of control which was necessitated by the pastoral economy. Irish women only had more rights in the Irish context because identity was corporate, not individual; a woman could divorce her husband because an affront to her honour was also an affront to the honour of her fine. Social mobility was only possible because the Irish aristocracy lacked the structural means of effectively subjugating their lessers in ways that their neighbouring aristocracies did.

I know that what little of brehon law remains is near untranslatable due to the time in which it was written (the seanchai mor is the second oldest law document in existence, only the sanchrist is older than it). It is estimated that it could be up to 10,000 years old. Came from the ideology of the wise king as opposed to the warrior king and was based upon natural law.

I sincerely doubt that this is true. Irish law definitely developed prior to written history but I doubt that it extended much further than a few centuries before the introduction of Christianity. Humans only actually colonized Ireland during the Mesolithic which was some 9,000 years ago, and I doubt that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers needed to codify laws concerning cattle pasturing and agricultural labour.