Legacies of Empire and the Study of Law

For the longest time, legal academia has avoided a broader engagement with the question of empire. Only in recent years, as imperial legacies became the topi of broad public discourse in Germany, all over Europe, but also in overseas colonies, legal studies started to engage with such legacies and their meaning more widely.

The lecture will provide an overview of this engagement and reflect on its evolution and meaning for legal studies. It will pursue three questions: First, the lecture will ask about explanations for the uneven attention to empire in different fields (such as public and private, international, European or domestic law) and in different places (centre and periphery). Secondly, it will describe different approaches to the study of colonial legacies and inquire into their respective potential and pitfalls. Finally, the lecture wants to reflect about different aims of studying the legacies of empire in law.

Through these questions, the lecture aims to develop tentative ideas about a more general framework of thinking about imperial legacies as a cross-disciplinary and transnational endeavor in times of increasing polarization and politicization.