A Global Conference on Rudolf von Jhering (1818-1892)

[We have the following announcement.]

Jhering Global: International Symposium on the occasion of Rudolf von Jhering’s 200th birthday

On 6 and 7 September 2018, the international symposium Jhering Global will be held in Hanover (Germany), marking the 200th anniversary of Rudolf von Jhering’s birth in 1818. It is organized by Professors Inge Kroppenberg (Georg August University Göttingen) and Stephan Meder (Leibniz University Hanover).

Jhering Global’s main intention is the development of a broad research perspective, both international and interdisciplinary, on the scientific work of Rudolf von Jhering (1818-1892). There is hardly a legal scholar whose work would be more suitable for this kind of research proposal than Jhering, whose impact on the fields of jurisprudence and social sciences was so lasting and fruitful and whose works are still being translated into many languages, even today.

Jhering Global’s purpose is twofold. Firstly, it will aim to explore the trajectories of Jhering's scientific ideas over the course of the past 150 years across Europe, the Americas and Asia. In order to achieve this, it calls on eminent legal scholars from several continents to present their perspectives on Jhering's work, and to bring different modes of reception to the table for discussion with scholars from Germany, Jhering’s native country. Thus, the conference will make a major contribution to exploring the history of the global transfer of juristic ideas from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

Secondly, Jhering Global will take an interdisciplinary approach. Since Jhering's work did not only cross geographical borders but also transcended the boundaries between scientific disciplines, the symposium will examine its impact on the establishment and development of social and political sciences since the late 19th century. Here, Jhering’s numerous allusions and references to the natural sciences, especially chemistry, will play a crucial role.
Conference program after the jump

Doctoral Program in Global History and Governance

We have word of the establishment of a Ph.D. program in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, Italy:

The PhD in Global History and Governance is an advanced research degree at the end of which each student must defend a dissertation based on independent and original academic research.  The course offers a multi-disciplinary training program based on history and law and open to contributions from other disciplines, such as economics, political science and political philosophy. The program focuses on the comparison, connections and processes of globalization that have characterized different areas of the planet since the first epoch of global imperialism and does so by focusing on the relational dimension of historical processes, legal regimes and the organization of power, on the interdependencies between economic, political, juridical, cultural and social factors and on the circulation, exchange and interconnection of ideas, people, institutions, legal cultures, political models, concepts, rights and goods on a global scale.
Members of the PhD board can offer training and preparation for research at the level of the best international centers in the following areas:

    History and historiography
    European empires of the modern and contemporary age
    States, wars and violence in the nineteenth and twentieth century
    History of slavery and forced labor
    The legal heritage of Europe and its integration
    Religions and the sacred in the modern and contemporary world
    Ideas, conceptions and practices of citizenship
    States, nations, languages, peoples, classes
    The globalization of law

The PhD course in Global History and Governance is designed for highly prepared and motivated students who also manage different languages and willing to study in multi and interdisciplinary environment.  Classes are taught either in Italian or English.  Candidates for the PhD are normally expected to hold a master’s degree (or an equivalent qualification) in a subject relevant to the intended topic of study.  The Coordinator is Daniela Luigia Caglioti and the PhD Board for 2018-2019 is here.  The deadline for applying is August 24, 2018.

Collin's "Regulated Self-Regulation" in Germany

Peter Collin, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, has posted all 781 pages of Regulated Self-Regulation from a Legal Historical Perspective: Studies and Sources, published auf Deustch as a Max Planck Institute for European Legal History Research.  Here is the English abstract:

This publication familiarises the reader with a number of fields of “regulated self-regulation,” i.e. regulatory complexes, in which state and non-state regulatory activities are intertwined. The area examined is Germany, and the period of investigation is the 19th and early 20th centuries. Each chapter begins with a comprehensive introduction, which provides an overview of the regulated self-regulation sector in question. This is then followed by the normative sources that illustrate the regulatory framework for the related sector. This contribution documents the results of the research project “Regulated Self-Regulation from a Legal Historical Perspective” at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. It offers an introduction to the field of research, familiarises the reader with central legal sources and, at the same time, is intended to stimulate further research.

Coffey's "Constitutionalism in Ireland, 1932-1938"

We’ve previously noted the publication of Drafting the Irish Constitution, 1935–1937: Transnational Influences in Interwar Europe (Palgrave Macmillan), by Donal K. Coffey, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.  Now comes its companion volume, Constitutionalism in Ireland, 1932–1938: National, Commonwealth, and International Perspectives:

The first of two volumes, this book examines constitutionalism in Ireland in the 1930s. Donal K. Coffey places the document and its drafters in the context of a turbulent decade for the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and Europe. He considers a series of key issues leading up to its drafting, including the failure of the 1922 Constitution, the rise of nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, and the abdication of Edward VIII. He sketches the drafting process, examines the roles of individual drafters and their intellectual influences, and considers the Constitution’s public reception, both domestically and internationally. This book illuminates a critical moment in Irish history and the confluence of national, Commonwealth, and international influences that gave rise to it, for scholars of Irish history as well as of legal, constitutional, and Commonwealth history more broadly.

CFP: “Migrants and Refugees in the Law" at Universidad Católica de Murcia

We a call for papers for the Fourth International Conference of the Chair Innocent III and the Universidad Católica de Murcia.  It is entitled “Migrants and Refugees in the Law: Historic Evolution, Current Situation and Unsolved Questions" and will be held in Murcia (Spain), December 12-14, 2018.

International Chair Innocent III calls on all interested researchers to submit papers related to the human mobility and the reception of refugees according to History of Law, Canon Law, Roman Law, Comparative Law, Philosophy, Theology, History, Sociology, Historiography and any other discipline related to the main theme, as stated in the following sessions:

December 12: session 1. The Migration in the Ancient and Medieval History. Historical approach to human mobility. 

December 13: session 2. Nation, State, Revolution.  The situation of the migrants and the refugees from the origin of the modern State. 

December 14: session 3. Between Emergency and Ordinariness.  Proposals for the enhancement of a constant phenomenon in the contemporary age. 

Proposals:  Title, academic affiliation, short CV and Abstract - 200 words - (EN, IT, ES, DE, FR), via mail: catedrainocencio@gmail.com 

Deadline: September 15, 2018. The Scientific Committee will respond to the proposal before September 30, 2018.

Publication: Papers selected by the Scientific Committee will be published in the special issue of the journal Vergentis (ISSN: 2445-2394) in the first half of 2019.

Legal Biography of the European Union at Max Planck

[We’ve received the following announcement of the conference Key Biographies in the Legal History of European Union, 1950-1993, to take place June 21-22, 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt.  It is the “annual conference of the research field ‘Legal History of the European Union’” at the Institute.]

The history of European Union law is still to a large extent uncharted territory. This conference is based on the assumption that biographical approaches are a valuable addition to this new field.
For a long time during the last century, biographies were regarded as stale and reductionist. In the field of legal history they tended to focus on prominent jurists and doctrines, to the exclusion of the broader legal and historical context. General historians were criticized for their cradle to grave approach, which stressed the continuities and coherence of life over fragmentation, and for their inclination to give too much importance to one actor over other historical factors. It is only recently that the disciplines of history as well as law have returned to the biographical approach.

At the intersection of law and history, the historiographical turn in international law has been particularly successful. Following the lead of Finnish scholar Martti Koskenniemi, many scholars used biographies to analyse international law and its discourses over time. This intellectual history has been exceptionally sophisticated with respect to analysing the nuances of how the doctrines of international law were created and further developed. However, this strand of research was foremost produced with the purpose of contributing to contemporary theoretical debate in international law. Perhaps for this reason, and also because it was mostly written by legal scholars, it has with few exceptions ignored archival sources and generally not used the broader historiography of international history, nor did it contribute to his historiography.   

Biographical approaches have also made a significant comeback in international history in recent years. Here, biographies have been used to transcend the national context and capture the social practice of the new international and transnational reality that emerged during the twentieth century. Biographical approaches, in particular when using private archives, have allowed historians to tap into the informal politics of international organisations and transnational networks, but also to trace the elusive links between worldviews, ideology, ideas and political practice. This approach can also be made fruitful for legal history because systematic archival research allows to explore the social practice that produces law and thus the intricate relationships between law, interests and institutional self-empowerment.

This conference invites both lawyers and historians to use their particular methodologies with regard to biographies of key figures in the history of European law. Such biographies will contribute to the development of the intellectual history of the field, focusing on the development of ideas and doctrines. At the same time they will explore the links between social practices and the broader context of law and legal thinking.

[The program and registration form are accessible here.]

CFP: Grad Student & Early-Career Scholar Panel, Medieval Legal History Workshop, ASLH 2018

[We have the following CFP.]

The American Society for Legal History invites paper submissions from graduate students and early-career scholars for a panel at a pre-conference workshop, which will take place immediately preceding the annual meeting on Thursday, Nov. 8, 2018. The topic of the workshop is Medieval Legal History, with medieval broadly defined as between late antiquity and early modernity. Applications for the panel at due June 15th.

The Medieval Legal History Workshop aims to present the work of a number of scholars of medieval law and society who are new to the ASLH’s annual meeting. In this way, we hope to promote scholarship in this area of legal history and to encourage medieval historians to attend the Society's meeting. The graduate student and early-career scholar panel will be composed of four speakers, who will present short papers of 10-12 minutes, followed by a robust discussion period afterward. Besides this panel, the event will also be composed of two longer-form talks with commentators, and a pre-circulated-paper workshop of three papers with two commentators.

As such, we encourage applications from PhD students, postdocs and VAPs who work on or with law in the late antique and medieval periods in its political, social, and cultural aspects and who have not traditionally attended the society’s meetings. We notably encourage applications from any legal tradition of the period, including (among others) Byzantine, Canon, Chinese, Islamic, or Jewish law. The goal of the panel is to provide graduate students and early-career scholars the opportunity to participate in the ASLH community in a more intimate setting, present their own work, and make meaningful contact with other presenters, attendant faculty, and other participants.

Applications to the workshop should include a current curriculum vitae, a title and abstract for the proposed talk. Applicants whose proposals are accepted will receive some support toward conference hotel and travel.

Queries and applications should be sent by email to Ada Kuskowski (akusk@upenn.edu) by June 15th, with the subject line “ASLH 2018 Graduate Student and Early-Career Scholar Panel.”

Duranti on the Conservative Human Rights Revolution

Marco Duranti, University of Sydney, published The Conservative Human Rights Revolution with Oxford University Press in 2017. From the publisher:

The European Court of Human Rights has long held unparalleled sway over questions of human rights violations across continental Europe, Britain, and beyond. Both its supporters and detractors accept the common view that the European human rights system was originally devised as a means of containing communism and fascism after World War II.

In The Conservative Human Rights Revolution, Marco Duranti radically reinterprets the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that conservatives conceived of the treaty not only as a Cold War measure, but also as a vehicle for pursuing a controversial domestic political agenda on either side of the Channel. Just as the Supreme Court of the United States had sought to overturn Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, a European Court of Human Rights was meant to constrain the ability of democratically elected governments to implement left-wing policies that British and French conservatives believed violated their basic liberties. Conservative human rights rhetoric, Duranti argues, evoked a romantic Christian vision of Europe. Rather than follow the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, conservatives such as Winston Churchill grounded their appeals for new human rights safeguards in the values of a bygone European civilization. All told, these efforts served as a basis for reconciliation between Germans and the "West," the exclusion of communists from the European project, and the denial of equal protection to colonized peoples. Illuminating the history of internationalism and international law, and elucidating Churchill's Europeanism and critical contribution to the genesis of the ECHR, this book revisits the ethical foundations of European integration across the first half of the twentieth century and offers a new perspective on the crisis in which the European Union finds itself today.

Praise for the book:

"Human rights history at its best. Duranti's well-written analysis of twentieth-century European internationalism is of lasting value. The insights into Euroskepticism that he provides could not be more timely. Necessary reading." -Lora Wildenthal

"Marco Duranti's enthralling and meditative study of the origins of the European Convention on Human Rights is not merely a lesson in historical imagination, restoring Winston Churchill's role as the project's prime mover and detailing the importance of a fateful alliance of religious conservatives and free-market defenders in its origins. For The Conservative Human Rights Revolution appears at a moment when it is even more instructive and ironic, with the Tories Duranti shows were instrumental in the beginning in full revolt against their own creation. Students of the past and observers of the present will welcome Duranti's own creation with gratitude." -Samuel Moyn

"Required reading for anyone interested in the ideological foundations of the European Union." -Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

"In this masterful--and timely--book, Marco Duranti plunges deep into rarely used archives to tell us the conservative origins of the European Convention on Human Rights. A magisterial and innovative piece of history that reshapes our understanding of human rights." -Patrick Weil

Further information is available here.

Coffey's "Drafting the Irish Constitution"

Donal K. Coffey, Senior Research Fellow, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, has just published Drafting the Irish Constitution, 1935–1937: Transnational Influences in Interwar Europe, with Palgrave Macmillan:

The second of two volumes, this book situates the drafting of the Irish Constitution within broader transnational constitutional currents. Donal K. Coffey pioneers a new method of draft sequencing in order to track early influences in the drafting process and demonstrate the importance of European influences such as the German, Polish, and Portuguese Constitutions to the Irish drafts. He also analyses the role that religion played in the drafting process, and considers the new institutions of state, such as the presidency and the senate, tracing the genesis of these institutions to other continental constitutions. Together with volume I, Constitutionalism in Ireland, 1932–1938, this book argues that the 1937 Constitution is only explicable within the context of the European and international trends which inspired it.

We’ll note when the (chronologically) first volume is out!

Sawyer's "Demos Assembled"

Stephen A. Sawyer, professor and chair of history, cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program, and director of the Center for Critical Democracy Studies at the American University of Paris. has published Demos Assembled: Democracy and the International Origins of the Modern State, 1840–1880 (University of Chicago Press):

Previous studies have covered in great detail how the modern state slowly emerged from the early Renaissance through the seventeenth century, but we know relatively little about the next great act: the birth and transformation of the modern democratic state. And in an era where our democratic institutions are rife with conflict, it’s more important now than ever to understand how our institutions came into being.

Stephen W. Sawyer’s Demos Assembled provides us with a fresh, transatlantic understanding of that political order’s genesis. While the French influence on American political development is well understood, Sawyer sheds new light on the subsequent reciprocal influence that American thinkers and politicians had on the establishment of post-revolutionary regimes in France. He argues that the emergence of the stable Third Republic (1870–1940), which is typically said to have been driven by idiosyncratic internal factors, was in fact a deeply transnational, dynamic phenomenon. Sawyer’s findings reach beyond their historical moment, speaking broadly to conceptions of state formation: how contingent claims to authority, whether grounded in violence or appeals to reason and common cause, take form as stateness.

Endorsements after the jump.

Interpretatio Prudentium

[We have the following announcement.]

Interpretatio Prudentium is a biannual scientific journal with double-blind peer review published by Legal Theory and History–Research Center of the University of Lisbon (THD-ULisboa) promoting scholarly excellence research and a profound knowledge of Roman Jurisprudence and the Roman Legal Tradition while aiming at a critical understanding of contemporary legal phenomena.

The Executive Committee of Interpretatio Prudentium invites the academic community to submit papers (monographs or reviews of recent publications) to be included in the fifth issue of the review (III, 2018, 1).

The Journal publishes in any neolatine language, English or German. Articles, under 70.000 characters (spaces included), should be submitted for publication along with a summary (c.550 characters) and keywords (3-5), written in the original language of the article and in an additional language. Reviews should be up to 15.000 characters.  (A style guide is here.)

The submitted articles should be sent in Word format to the e-mail interpretatio@fd.ulisboa.pt with carbon copy to the editorial secretary (claudiaeliasduarte@fd.ulisboa.pt). The deadline for the submission of papers is 15th May 2018.

The submitted articles are reviewed by members of the Scientific Committee of Interpretatio Prudentium, the identities of both reviewer and author remaining anonymous throughout the review process.

[Contents of published issues are available for 2016:1; 2016:2; and 2017:1.  Subscribe by completing this form or by obtaining individual issues here.]

Koposov on memory, history, and law

Nikolay Koposov, Emory University, has published Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia with Cambridge University Press. From the publisher:

Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.

Here is the Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• 1. The rise of memory and the origins of memory laws
• 2. Memory laws in Western Europe
• 3. Memory laws in Eastern Europe
• 4. Memory laws in Ukraine
• 5. Memory laws in Yeltsin's Russia
• 6. Memory laws in Putin's Russia
• Conclusion

Further information is available here.

Gillis on heresy and dissent

Matthew Bryan Gillis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has published Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais with Oxford University Press. (We noted the book earlier here.) From the publisher:

Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais. Frankish Christianity required obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, voluntary participation in reform, and the belief that salvation was possible for all baptized believers. Yet Gottschalk--a mere priest--developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination, claiming that only divine election through grace enabled eternal life. Gottschalk preached to Christians within the Frankish empire--including bishops--and non-Christians beyond its borders, scandalously demanding they confess his doctrine or be revealed as wicked reprobates. Even after his condemnations for heresy in the late 840s, Gottschalk continued his activities from prison thanks to monks who smuggled his pamphlets to a subterranean community of supporters. This study reconstructs the career of the Carolingian Empire's foremost religious dissenter in order to imagine that empire from the perspective of someone who worked to subvert its most fundamental beliefs. Examining the surviving evidence (including his own writings), Matthew Gillis analyzes Gottschalk's literary and spiritual self-representations, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalk's case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority.

 In praise of the book:

"This is an important study that scholars of the Carolingian world and of early-medieval religious culture in general will read and use for many years to come. It is a book we should be grateful to have..." -Scott Ashley

Here's the Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Scandals of God's Servant
• 1. A Monk Against His Abbot, 829
• 2. Betrayal and Injustice in the Early 830s
• 3. A Missionary of Grace, c. 835-848
• 4. A Theologian-Martyr in 849
• 5. Letters from Prison, 849-851
• 6. A Master of Subterranean Dissent, 850s
• 7. Resisting Heresy unto Death in the 860s
• Conclusion: Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire

Further information is available here.

Sullivan Named Berger-Howe Fellow

The Program in Law and History at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce that William P. Sullivan will be the Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Legal History Fellow for 2018-2019.  A graduate of Princeton and Yale Law School, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of classics and history at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation is entitled, “Relevance in the Civil Law Tradition: The Emergence of the Roman-Canon Law of Positions.”  He was a Legal History Fellow at Yale Law School and is currently clerking for Judge José A. Cabranes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Fritz on Judges and Advocates General of the EU Court of Justice

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.]

Vera Fritz, Juges et avocats généraux de la Cour de Justice de l'Union européenne (1952-1972): Une approche biographique de l'histoire d'une révolution juridique.  (Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 312), Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2018, ISBN 978-3-465-04350-8, IX, 396 p.

Drawing on archives assembled in the six founding member states of the European Union, the new French-language volume in the series "Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte" offers a new perspective on the"constitutionalisation process" of the European treaties that were launched in the 1960s by the EU Court of Justice. It examines the dynamics that prevailed within the institution during its revolutionary years and highlights the professional and personal backgrounds of the first European judges and Advocates General, some of whom help shape some of the most well-known and commented judgments of the Court. The author seeks to understand how the judges succeeded in seriously limiting the sovereignty of the member states without provoking a rebellion by national decision-makers. The book focuses on the Court's political network and the relationship of judges with the governments of the member states. Through a detailed study of the selection process of the members of the Court, this monograph also provides answers to the question of whether governments tried to put an end to its bold jurisprudence by changing the composition of the bench of judges.

For more information and TOC, see the website of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.

Mirow on Duguit

M. C. Mirow, Florida International University College of Law, has posted Léon Duguit, which will appear in Great Christian Jurists in French History, edited by Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo (Cambridge University Press, 2019):

French jurist Léon Duguit (1859-1928) was a theorist of the modern state and its relationship to law. His work on the nature of property and ownership, defining them as social functions, was an important step towards dismantling the conceptual wall between public and private law. He sought to apply sociological and scientific analysis to his study of law and the state. This chapter explores Duguit’s thought with particular reference to Roman Catholicism as a deeply embedded aspect of French culture. While little of his work expressly invokes Christianity, his turns towards solidarity and public service in the area of public law and his development of the social function of property in the area of private law reveal a level of concordance with Roman Catholic thought in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century France. Despite Duguit’s lack of engagement with the Church’s teachings in his scientific exploration of the state and law, his relationship to Catholicism remains difficult to determine. The Church and Christianity presented themselves to Duguit as social and political phenomena to be recognized, respected, observed, and theorized. As a good lay sociologist of law, Duguit considered the Church in his work and throughout his life.

Gelter and Helleringer on Fiduciary Principles in European Civil Law

Martin Gelter, Fordham University School of Law, and Geneviève Helleringer, ESSEC Business School Paris, have posted Fiduciary Principles in European Civil Law Systems, which is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Fiduciary Law, edited by Evan J. Criddle, Paul B. Miller & Robert H. Sitkoff:

This chapter surveys fiduciary principles in Western European civil law jurisdictions. Focusing on France and Germany, we suggest that functional equivalents to fiduciary duties have developed on the Continent, although they do not always carry exactly the same connotations as their common law counterparts. We suggest that the common law developed fiduciary duties as a distinct category largely for two reasons. First, the common law distinguished between law and equity, with fiduciary law developing within equity. By contrast, contracts law required consideration, which meant that fiduciary principles for gratuitous actions necessarily arose outside of contract law. Civil law generally did not develop this particular categorization. For example, the paradigmatic fiduciary relationship, the mandate (agency), is by default a gratuitous contract. Consequently, the lines between fiduciary and contract law remained blurred. Second, common law bargaining for contracts emphasizes part autonomy more strongly, while the civil law of contracts incorporated a stronger duty of good faith, thus making it more hospitable to an implied and inchoate loyalty obligation. The duty of loyalty in civil law jurisdictions is not categorically different from such duties, but exists on a continuum with them. Consequently, civil law duties of loyalty in those relationships that would be considered fiduciary under the common law can be seen as an extension of weaker loyalty obligations elsewhere. We survey the civil law of agency, equivalents of trust, as well as corporate and financial law. Germany and countries influenced by German law began to identify duties of loyalty in corporate and trust relationships in the middle of the 20th Century and identified them as a larger civil law principle permeating different areas of law. France and related jurisdictions have been more reluctant to adopt such duties, and have been more likely to rely on specific statutory prohibitions to reach similar results.

Manko on Polish Private Law since 1989

Rafal Manko, University of Amsterdam Centre for the Study of European Contract Law, has posted Towards a Typology of Dimensions of the Continuity and Discontinuity of Law: The Perspective of Polish Private Law after the 1989 Transformation, which appears in the Wroclaw Review of Law, Administration and Economics 6.1 (2018): 108-120:

Discussions concerning the continuity or discontinuity of the legal culture require the elaboration of a rigorous framework, allowing the comparison of hypotheses and findings concerning different periods, legal systems and branches of law. The present paper aims at identifying four fundamental aspects of the possible continuity or discontinuity of law in the positivist sense, therefore only a part of legal culture. The paper proposes four such dimensions: structure, conceptual framework, fundamental principles, institutions and rules. The propositions put forward in the paper are grounded in, and tentatively applied to, Polish private law after the 1989 transformation from state socialism to capitalism.

Douglas on a Nazi War Crimes Trial

Lawrence Douglas, Amherst College, published The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial with Princeton University Press in 2016. From the press:

In 2009, Harper's Magazine sent war-crimes expert Lawrence Douglas to Munich to cover the last chapter of the lengthiest case ever to arise from the Holocaust: the trial of eighty-nine-year-old John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk’s legal odyssey began in 1975, when American investigators received evidence alleging that the Cleveland autoworker and naturalized US citizen had collaborated in Nazi genocide. In the years that followed, Demjanjuk was stripped of his American citizenship and sentenced to death by a Jerusalem court as "Ivan the Terrible" of Treblinka—only to be cleared in one of the most notorious cases of mistaken identity in legal history. Finally, in 2011, after eighteen months of trial, a court in Munich convicted the native Ukrainian of assisting Hitler’s SS in the murder of 28,060 Jews at Sobibor, a death camp in eastern Poland. 

An award-winning novelist as well as legal scholar, Douglas offers a compulsively readable history of Demjanjuk’s bizarre case. The Right Wrong Man is both a gripping eyewitness account of the last major Holocaust trial to galvanize world attention and a vital meditation on the law’s effort to bring legal closure to the most horrific chapter in modern history.

Praise for the book:

"Douglas relates with authority and clarity the story of these complex legal processes. . . . [He] does justice to both the story's factual complexities and its moral and political conundrums. . . . The Right Wrong Man, from its summary title to its thoughtful postscript, is an impressive work, as well as a timely one in its demonstration of the power of legal systems to learn from past missteps." -Anthony Julius

"The Right Wrong Man is powerful, richly observed, and darkly entertaining. Anyone interested in postwar history will want to read it." -Elizabeth Kolbert

"Lawrence Douglas has once again provided us with a history-laden and provocative analysis of Holocaust trials. His riveting study of the Demjanjuk saga is of importance, not just to historians and jurists, but to all those who wonder how can justice ever prevail when the crime being adjudicated is genocide." -Deborah E. Lipstadt

Further information is available here.

Great Christian Jurists: Spain and France

Cambridge University Press is publishing a series, "Great Christian Jurists" that "comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied."

Rafael Domingo, Emory University School of Law and University of Navarra has posted contributions to two of these volumes.  The first is his and Javier Martínez-Torrón’s introduction to Great Christian Jurists in Spanish History (Cambridge University Press, April 2018 ):

Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

The second is his and Brigitte Basdevant-Gaudemet’s Paul Fournier (1853-1935), a chapter in the forthcoming Great Christian Jurists in French History, edited by Olivier Descamps and Rafael Domingo (Cambridge University Press, 2019):

A leading figure and restorer of the history of canon law in France, Paul Fournier became in his lifetime and remains today a worldwide distinguished historian of medieval canon law. Many of his writings, especially those dealing with medieval ecclesiastical courts and those referring to canonical collections, have held up under the scrutiny of time. His academic footprint has continued through the work of great students and students of students, such as Gabriel Le Bras and Jean Gaudemet. As a supporting actor in the religious events related to the French Third Republic, Fournier was able to accommodate his traditional Catholicism to the new social trends and to sow peace in a turbulent moment in the relations between the Church and the French State. The influence he exercised over the general ideas of his time, both in the legal field and in philosophical and moral terms, cannot be minimized. Men like Fournier enabled the Church to reconcile itself with the state and with science.