The Legal History Review 86:1-2

Volume 86, issue 1-2 for 2018 of The Legal History Review/Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis/Revue d'Histoire du Droit is out. Here is the line-up of research articles:

• "100 Years The Legal History Review"
• L. Waelkens, "Reflexions on bona fides and mala fides in the Roman law tradition"
• Agnieszka Kacprzak and Maria Nowak, "Foundlings in the Greco-Roman world: Status and the (im)possibility of adoption"
• Guido Rossi, "Baldus and the Limits of Representation"
• R. A. Houston, "The composition and distribution of the legal profession, and the use of law in Britain and Ireland, c.1500-c.1850"
• Anne Dobigny-Reverso, "La clause de voie parée : une manifestation de l’opposition entre liberté contractuelle et droit de propriété au XIXe siècle"
• Frederik Dhondt, "Changing interpretations of Belgium's permanent neutrality in three legal treatises"
• Chen Li, "A network of legal transfer: The public international law education of Zhu Qiwu under the wings of Wang Tieya, Huang Zhengming and Humphrey Waldock"
• Marcin W. Bukala, "The scholastics on negotiatio and the just price: medieval and early modern ideas in Theologians and contract law"
• Paolo Angelini, "The Serbian version of the Syntagma of Blastares, the Lex Romana Serborum"

The issue also includes these book reviews:

• A. J. B. Sirks on The Oxford handbook of Roman law and society, edited by P.J. Du Plessis, C. Ando, K. Tuori
• P.L. Nève on Die Akten des Kaiserlichen Reichshofrats, Serie II: Antiqua, Band 3: Karton 135-277f, herausgegeben v. W. Sellert
• Alain Wijffels on L’arrestographie flamande, Jurisprudence et littérature juridique à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1668-1789) by Géraldine Cazals

Further information is available here.

Funded Doctoral Post at Helsinki on the Roman Republicanism

[We have the following announcement from Kaius Tuori, the PI on the projects EuroStorie and SpaceLaw.]

A four year fully funded doctoral student position is now available at my new research project at the University of Helsinki. The deadline is September 17th. I am primarily looking for a recent graduate from history, classics, legal history, Roman law and politics, who is interested in completing a doctoral degree as a part of an international research project.

The project  “Law, Governance and Space: Questioning the Foundations of the Republican Tradition (SpaceLaw.fi), funded by the ERC, examines the emergence of republican governance through the changes in the conceptions of public and private space from the Antiquity to the present. The theme of the doctoral project would cover the formation and reception of the ancient texts, ideals and legal tradition in their cultural contexts and their implications in the European historical tradition.

The official ad may be found here.  Instead of a full research proposal, I also welcome discursive papers on relevant themes and methods and the possibilities they would have for novel results.

Kearley's "Lost in Translations"

Timothy G. Kearley, Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Wyoming College of Law, has published Lost in Translations: Roman Law Scholarship and Translation in Early Twentieth-Century America, in the Legal History Series (edited by Duke Law’s H. Jefferson Powell) of the Carolina Academic Press:

Earlier generations of Americans were connected to the classical past—to ancient Greece and Rome—to an extent we find hard to understand today. The Founders’ training in Latin and ancient history led them to model their new nation after the Roman Republic, and most educated Americans had broadly similar skills and knowledge until the early twentieth century.  Lost in Translations describes how this connection helped inspire men who were educated in the late 1800s to dedicate much of their lives to translating fundamental documents of Western Civilization—such as Justinian’s Code—and to write extensively about Roman law. This book addresses the history of American education (including legal education), as well as the function of Roman law among the elite bar. The book also uses correspondence and other previously unpublished information to humanize such major figures as Roscoe Pound.

Lost in Translations focuses on five Roman law scholars (all but one of whom were trained as lawyers) who worked early in the twentieth century: Samuel Parsons Scott (1846–1929), Charles Sumner Lobingier (1866–1956), Charles Phineas Sherman (1874–1962), Fred H. Blume (1875–1971), and Clyde Pharr (1883–1972). Among them, they produced the first English translations of the Codex Theodosianus and Justinian’s entire Corpus Juris Civilis, as well as other ancient Roman laws. This book describes their heroic and often solitary labor, some of which they did not see come to fruition in their own lifetimes. It should be of interest to historians, lawyers, educators, and classicists.

Kearley on Early 20th-Century Roman Law Translations

Timothy G. Kearley, University of Wyoming College of Law, has posted Roman Law Scholarship and Translation in Early Twentieth-Century America:

This article provides an overview of the book Lost in Translations, which examines the lives and work of five twentieth century American Roman law translator-scholars: Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Fred H. Blume (1875-1971), who single-handedly translated Justinian’s Code and Novels; gentleman-scholar Samuel Parsons Scott (1846-1929) and classics professor Clyde Pharr (1883-1972), both of whom created massive translations of ancient Roman law; Charles Phineas Sherman (1874-1962), a lawyer-professor who translated some Roman law and wrote prolifically about it; and, finally, Charles Sumner Lobingier (1866-1956), a judge-professor who wrote about Roman law, translated a little, championed the publication of Scott’s work, and was connected to all of the others. All of these men were prominent during their lifetimes but are largely forgotten now. It is hoped that Lost in Translations will draw attention to the work these extraordinary men did and stir an interest to our classical past.

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.]

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.

Penna on Byzantine Law and Italian City-States

Daphne Penna, University of Groningen Faculty of Law, has posted Odd Topics, Old Methods and the Cradle of the Ius Commune: Byzantine Law and the Italian City-States, which appeared in the Utrecht Law Review 13 (2017): 49-55:

In this paper I try to demonstrate how Byzantine law, a subject odd and exotic at first sight provides a piece of the puzzle that helps us to complete the big picture, the origins of our European legal identity. I refer to some concrete examples of legal interaction between the Byzantine and the Western side of Europe in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries – a period in which the ius commune began to take shape – and explain the method I used step by step, the specific challenges I confronted in the sources and the outcomes of this approach. The comparative legal study of documents of the medieval period at a European level can help us to answer the question whether, long before the making of today’s Europe, today’s European countries were already connected by common legal forms.

Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 58: 3-4

The trilingual Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis /Revue d'Histoire du Droit /The Legal History Review is out with a new combined issue, Volume 85, Issue 3-4 (2017).  It includes a paper just posted to SSRN: The Court of Common Pleas of East Florida 1763-1783, by Matthew Mirow, Florida International University College of Law:

Legal historians have surmised that court records of the British province of East Florida (1763-1783) have been either lost or destroyed. This assumption was based on the poor conditions for survival of documents in Florida and statements made in the secondary literature on the province. Nonetheless, a significant number of documents related to the courts of British East Florida exist in the National Archives (Kew). These materials reveal an active legal culture using English law in a wide range of courts including (1) the Court of Common Pleas; (2) the Court of Chancery; (3) the Court of General Sessions of the Peace, Oyer et Terminer, Assize and General Gaol Delivery; (4) Special Courts of Oyer et Terminer; (5) the Court of Vice-Admiralty; (6) the Court of Ordinary; (7) the General Court; and (8) a District Court.

This article studies a portion of the documents related to the Court of Common Pleas to describe the nature of the court's practice in civil litigation. It closely examines three cases for which sufficient extant pleadings permit the reconstruction of the general contours of recovery for breach of a sales contract through an action of trespass on the case, for contract enforcement through an action of covenant, and for recovery of a sum certain through an action of debt. This small window provided by these cases into the activities of this court reveals a heretofore unknown world of English common law in North America during and after the American Declaration of Independence. This new information supplements and challenges our established understanding of colonial law in the revolutionary period and the use of law in the British Empire. This study illustrates the many opportunities these sources offer to legal historians of the period.

TOC for the combined issues after the jump.

Herzog on European Law

Out now by Tamar Herzog, Harvard University is A Short History of European Law: The Law Two and a Half Millenia with Harvard University Press. From the publisher: 

To many observers, European law seems like the endpoint of a mostly random walk through history. Certainly the trajectory of legal systems in the West over the past 2,500 years is far from self-evident. In A Short History of European Law, Tamar Herzog offers a new road map that reveals underlying patterns and unexpected connections. By identifying what European law was, where its iterations could be found, who was allowed to make and implement it, and what the results were, she ties legal norms to their historical circumstances, and allows readers to grasp their malleability and fragility.

Herzog describes how successive European legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the establishment and growth of the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was understood, used, and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.

Expanding the definition of Europe to include its colonial domains, Herzog explains that British and Spanish empires in the New World were not only recipients of European legal traditions but also incubators of new ideas. Their experiences, as well as the constant tension between overreaching ideas and naive localism, explain how European law refashioned itself as the epitome of reason and as a system with potentially global applications.

Praise for the book: 

“Herzog’s book is a remarkable achievement, sure to become a go-to text for scholars and students alike. Comprehensive and concise, it bridges the Continental and Anglo-American traditions and focuses on vital questions of legal authority and legitimacy. It is a must-read for anyone eager to understand the origins of core legal concepts and institutions—like due process and rule of law—that profoundly shape the societies in which we live today.”-Amalia D. Kessler

“Few histories are more consequential than those of our laws, since how we imagine the relationship of our laws to their past can itself affect the present of our polities. How surprising, then, that few historians have dared to confront the vastness of that history. Herzog’s lapidary book is much vaster than even its title suggests and is required reading for Americanists North and South, and indeed, for all of us inhabiting a postcolonial world deeply marked by the millennia of legal imaginings whose dynamic transformations it so lucidly charts.”-David Nirenberg

“A fundamental and timely contribution to the understanding of Europe as seen through its legal systems. Herzog masterfully shows the profound unity of legal thinking and practices across the Continent and in England. This will become required reading for students and scholars across the social sciences.”-Federico Varese

Further information is available here.

A Roman Law & Legal History Job at KU Leuven

We've recently noted the following job listing:

The Faculty of Law and the Research Unit for Roman Law and Legal History [at KU Leuven] invite applications for a fulltime position as a member of the Senior Academic Staff in the field of legal history. The assignment consists of teaching in an academic context, scientific research and additional duties of an academic nature, along with those to the wider society.

More.

Translation of Leibniz on Legal Education

Carmelo Massimo De Iuliis, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, has published an English translation of Leibniz’s 1667 treatise, The New Method of Learning and Teaching Jurisprudence with Talbot Publishing. From the press:

The first complete English translation from the Latin of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Nova methodus discendae docendaeque Jurisprudentiae. Better known for his contributions to philosophy, metaphysics and mathematics, as co-discoverer along with Isaac Newton of calculus, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was also an attorney, diplomat, state official and judge of the Mainz Court of Appeals. The New Method of Learning and Teaching Jurisprudence is his prescription for a curriculum of study for lawyers and as such is an important indicator of the origins of legal education in the late renaissance year of 1667, when John Milton published Paradise Lost. Already translated into German and French, this is the first unabridged translation of the 1667 Frankfurt edition in a modern language, a new direct translation of the Latin text with notes by Carmelo Massimo de Iuliis (Department of Public and Private Economy Law, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano). The translation is enhanced by De Iuliis' introduction that offers a biographical sketch of Leibniz, an overview of the reception of his ideas and a discussion of Leibniz' views on the philosophical concepts of logic and rhetoric as applied to the study of jurisprudence and a systematic reconstruction of legal systems.

Full information on the book is available here.

Cairns on Legal Transplants

Back in 2015, John W. Cairns, University of Edinburgh, published Codification, Transplants and History: Law Reform in Louisiana (1808) and Quebec (1866) with Talbot Publishing. From the press:

When Louisiana enacted its Digest of the Civil Laws in 1808 and Quebec its Civil Code of Lower Canada in 1866, both jurisdictions were in a period of transition - economic, social and political. In both, the laws had originally been transplanted from European nations whose societies were in many ways different from theirs. This book offers the first systematic and detailed exploration of the two new codes in light of social and legal change. Cairns examines the rich, complex, and varying legal cultures -- French, Spanish, Civilian and Anglo-American -- on which the two sets of redactors drew in drafting their codes. He places this examination in the context surrounding each codification, and the legal history of both societies. Cairns offers a detailed analysis of family law and employment in the two codes, showing how their respective redactors selected from a defined range of sources and materials to construct their codes. He shows that they acted relatively freely, attempting to inscribe into law rules reflecting what they understood to be the needs of their society from an essentially intuitive and elite perspective. While not propounding a universal theory of legal development, Cairns nonetheless shows the types of factors likely to influence legal change more generally.

Further information is available here.