Silbernagl on Corruption and Habsburg Rule

Rainer Silbernagl has posted A Classification of Malpractice and Thoughts on Corruption in the 18th and 19th Centuries in Habsburg Legislation, which also appears in the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series.

 "Corruption" has become a hotly contested term that is imputed to capture the symptoms of manipulative human legal behaviour and to label a clearly identifiable juridical disease. Despite its broad use across many academic disciplines and invocation in diverse research findings, the term is particularly vague in jurisprudence. This article examines the core of corruption that can be apprehended legislatively, focusing on Habsburg rule between 1750 and 1918. In this transitional period, the modern-day constitutional state emerged whose intellectual roots in many fields of dogmatic law constitute the foundation of our modern legal consciousness. With its penal law drafts, the second half of the 19th century is a particularly useful period to analyse how these legal fields interact.