Matilde Cazzola's research project examines the role of the 'protection' framework in the British colonial state, focusing on how it facilitated the governance and profitability of the mobility of indentured labourers and indigenous peoples. It highlights that this mobility was regulated and secured by law to remove disorderly or criminal elements, closely linking protection with policing and crime prevention from the early nineteenth century. She also explores the use of protection as a justification for the collection of social knowledge about these groups, which informed social policies and legal measures.

As legal frameworks struggle to keep pace with rapid technological advances and evolving societal norms, the urgency of linking academic research to real-world societal issues has never been greater. The field of law significantly benefits from the critical insights provided by researchers. We caught up with Anselm Küsters, who has just been awarded the Ludwig Erhard Prize for Economics Writing (Ludwig-Erhard-Förderpreis für Wirtschaftspublizistik). We talked to him about the need for experts to amplify their voices, the feedback his articles have generated, and his knack for finding topics that interest both academic and social audiences.

Once again we are very excited to be welcoming a group of early-career researchers from all over the world here in Frankfurt for the Max Planck Summer Academy for Legal History. This year’s overarching research theme is: ‘The mediality and materiality of law’. ‘Mediality’ and ‘materiality’ are important keywords in historical and cultural studies debates. Legal scholarship has also been devoting a great deal of thought to the material and medial conditions of the production and enforcement of law.