Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 32 (2024)
The recent issue of our Institute’s journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (Rg) presents high-level research contributions and candid reviews of books on topics that are relevant for the field of legal history, in Germany and worldwide.
Three essays are dedicated to the legal history of slavery in the early modern and modern periods: Carlo Bersani traces the European legal discourse on servi and personae (16th–18th century). Matilde Cazzola looks at the efforts to abolish slavery in British Caribbean, and Tamar Herzog analyses some aspects of the historiography of the legal history of slavery, a field so far dominated by Atlantic history.
The way in which jurists translated traditional knowledge bases for their present time in order to get a grasp on colonial realities in 16th-century Latin America is analysed in Christiane Birr’s Research contribution on Gregorio López. It shows how López’ ubiquitously used edition (including glossary) of the medieval Siete Partidas, by reverting to seemingly old knowledge, resulted in answers to new problems in the 16th-century Iberian empires. A set of entirely different, long-neglected sources of law is highlighted by Paolo Revilla Orias and Pablo Quisbert Condori. They offer an introduction to the local archives and the normative knowledge of indigenous communities in the ‘Plurinational State of Bolivia’.
Writing about the early modern Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), Tobias Schenk asks to what extent our view as legal historians is still influenced by the paradigm of statehood and makes the case for research along the lines of praxeology and the history of knowledge. Finally, Andrew Harding presents a case study on the transfer of rights under common law, the Six Widows' case, which dates back to the early 20th century in Singapore.
Like the other segments, the Critique section and its numerous reviews of recent publications reflect the mpilhlt's research areas. The assessed volumes cover topics such as imperial and colonial legal history, the history of codification and constitutional history, the history of international law and of EU law, and the connection between the theory and the history of law.
Two Marginalia conclude this volume. Paul Kahn offers a critical commentary on a chapter from The Cambridge Legal History of Latin American Law in Global Perspective, which was published this year; and Erk Volkmar Heyen writes about stairs as settings for gender-specific glorification and condemnation, opening the reader's eye to legal aesthetics. His contribution settled the question of what motif we would use for the image spread of the print issue: stairs of all shapes and sizes, reflecting a great diversity of epochs and world regions.
Rechtsgeschichte — Legal History 32 is now available in print from the Vittorio Klostermann publishing house, and online in Open Access via the journal's website.