We have the following news, from the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History:
The ASLH is delighted to honor Thomas Duve, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, both as an erudite and seemingly indefatigable historian, and as an institution-builder who nurtures the next generation of scholarship on a transnational scale.
Thomas Duve made his mark in the study of canon law and the legal and theological thought of the 16th and 17th century School of Salamanca, Spain, which had traditionally been identified with a comparatively small group of early modern students and professors of theology. Duve and his colleagues have reframed the Salamanca School to see it as a global enterprise, not simply for its far-flung missionary activity, but for the way in which its members responded to and incorporated thought and practice from Asia and the Americas during the long period of colonization and missionization.
Duve has continued to reflect on what he refers to as "systems of normativity" emerging across the Iberian colonial era. He sees those systems not just as extensions of metropolitan conceptions, but as the result of dialogic processes. His goal is thus a "global history of knowledge production" that spans legal history, canon law, and social history, and incorporates the voices of enslaved and indigenous men and women as well as those of Europeans. In many journal articles and edited volumes he has explicated, demonstrated, and expanded up this approach.
His own background is itself transnational. He initially studied law and philosophy in Heidelberg, Buenos Aires, and Munich, and taught legal history for several years at the Faculty of Canon Law at the Catholic University in Buenos Aires, before becoming Professor of Comparative Legal History at the Law School of the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, and Director at the Max-Planck-Institute. Under his influence, the Max Planck has transformed itself across the last decades from an institution focused on Europe into a global intellectual powerhouse that trains and nurtures scholars from different traditions, working on different regions, and heightens the visibility of their scholarship.
Duve's scholarly research demonstrates the method he advocates. For example, he has shown that the classic European category of miserabiles personae-- who could benefit from certain specific ecclesiastical legal protections -- had to be "localized" anew in colonial Latin America. The Latin words in treatises could not alone answer the question of who might properly be thought of as occupying that category in a society marked by the presence of a large indigenous population as well as enslaved Africans held as property. In turn, the actions of those indigenous and enslaved persons who might seek such protection necessarily reshaped the norm itself.
Duve emphasizes that transmission is not a matter of the diffusion of norms and codes outward from the European center, but a continuous process in which both theory and practice are necessarily bent by local conditions and expectations. So to understand the processes of localization of law-- which may vary from parish to parish as well as region to region -- requires consulting all kinds of sources, including those that bounce the impact of localization back to the initial point of departure.
Duve argues that each instance of practice can then shape theory in the next stage. Indigenous ideas, initiatives, and conditions thus shape the very law itself. Books in hand and practice on the ground appear in continuous, albeit highly asymmetrical, dialogue. What a given normative concept can actually do in a new setting, circles back to shape how it is expressed.
This approach has proven to be generative for cross-national research teams, such as a recent project focused on legal pluralism and normativity in the Portuguese empire. Here we see the intersection between Duve's scholarship and his institutional commitments. The core of his interpretive approach rests on dialogue among far-flung peoples, and embodies a picture of legal history as a global discipline. He has carried this over into the re-shaping of the mandate of the Max Planck Institute, seeking out, identifying, and nurturing scholars from Latin America and Africa as well as the United States and Europe, and expanding his own teaching as a visiting professor in Asia.
Thomas Duve's peers marvel at his intellectual brilliance, and those he has mentored thoroughly perceive his generosity. We are delighted to recognize and honor his scholarship and his impact on our profession, naming him an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
We will note this year's other honorary fellows in separate posts.
-- Karen Tani
