Monday, January 8, 2018

Haferkamp on the German Historical School

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

Hans-Peter Haferkamp, Die Historische Rechtsschule (Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte 310), Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2018, ISBN 978-3-465-04332-4, IX, 396 p.

Enough books have been written about the German Historical School to fill entire libraries. Nevertheless, it is still difficult to determine who should be counted as a member of this school and who should not. One reason is that the traditional historical method, which dominated German legal historiography in the 20th century for quite some time, left marks that are still visible today. Eras have been interpreted through leading figures that supposedly matched the respective zeitgeist. The German Historical School has been identified with Friedrich Carl v. Savigny ever since. As a result, the research was focused on Savigny almost to the complete exclusion of his pupils.

As a group phenomenon, the German Historical School remains an amazing terra incognita to this day. This work attempts to reconstruct the German Historical School for the first time as an academic school and thereby as a context of communication for a great number of legal scholars. Three fields of legal activity within which the German Historical School presented itself as a unified whole will be examined: the jurist as a teacher, as a legal scholar and as a judge.

More information and TOC here.