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I'm very pleased to announce
that the latest volume of Comparative
Legal History, a partnership between the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) and Hart Publishing, has been published.
- Seán Patrick Donlan (sean.donlan@ul.ie), Editor
Access the issue online and
purchase individual papers here.
Subscription information is
available here. As the official ESCLH publication, its members receive a free subscription.
The articles in this issue include:
Geoffrey MacCormack - ‘Agreement’, ‘Contract’ and
‘Debt’ in Early Chinese Law
This paper examines the
evidence for the development of a law of contract during the period of the
Warring States (481-771 BCE) and the Qin/Han dynasties (221 BCE – 220 CE). From
a study of the technical terms found in the context of agreements, in
particular zhai (debt), yue (agreement), and quan
(document in two parts), the conclusion is drawn that early Chinese law never
developed beyond the stage of recognition of a number of distinct types of
agreement to which legal consequences were attached. No ‘law of contract’,
comparable to that developed in Rome at roughly the same epoch, emerged from
these particularities. The main reason for the difference between Rome and
China, it is suggested, lay in the lack of emergence in China of a class of
private lawyer resembling the Roman jurists.
Marcel Senn - ‘Law and Authority’: A Political and Legal
Paradigm by Thomas Hobbes and its Different Receptions in the USA, Canada,
Britain and Germany since 1989
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan
is one of the few grand oeuvres representing the code of pre-modern
political power. This code often legitimates our present understanding of law
and state. Therefore it is necessary to discover the ‘socialisation’ of the
interpreters – that is the impact of social, cognitive interests within
scientific interpretations of law – so as to improve our understanding in a
more differentiated way. The author demonstrates this in relation to three
different discourses on Leviathan conducted in North America, Britain
and Germany during the last twenty-five years. He thereby shows how the
‘socialisation’ of the interpreters is manifest in these particular discourses,
and what this means to a reader’s critical comprehension when he or she tries
to understand an opus such as Leviathan by merely reading
secondary literature.
Johannes W Flume - Law and Commerce: The
Evolution of Codified Business Law in Europe
This paper tracks the
evolution of the codification of commercial law and company law, also known as
business law. Although the literature on codification in general is vast,
little attention has been dedicated to the importance of business law in this
context despite the first major moves towards codification being achieved in
this field. A comparative and historical survey of the codification of business
law in France, England and Germany illustrates how the European legal landscape
has been affected by the process of casting the law in statutory form. Indeed,
regardless of the commonly-held misconception that there is ‘a’ commercial
code, the legislative responses to the needs of commerce have varied widely
from country to country, for while company law was always in focus, the rest of
the corpus differs substantially. The code de commerce of 1807 was
primarily of a procedural nature, while the German commercial code of 1863
created its own ‘private law cosmos’ and the late English codes adopted yet
another, very selective, strategy. The aim of this comparative study is to
understand the foundations of the legal institutions of the nineteenth century
which still form the basis of our current statutes. This in turn allows some
predictions for likely future developments to be made.
Tatiana Borisova and Jukka
Siro - Law between Revolution and
Tradition: Russian and Finnish Revolutionary Legal Acts, 1917–18
This article compares the
legislative practices of two socialist revolutions in Russia (the Bolshevik
revolution) and Finland in late 1917 and in 1918. Notwithstanding the considerable
differences in the social, political and economic conditions in Finland and
Russia, the revolutionaries in both countries had similar legislative
strategies. The revolutionary legislative policies had the same ends: to secure
the success of the revolutions, and, eventually, to build a new and better
society. This article seeks to demonstrate the history of revolutionary
law-making as a juncture of two main tendencies: the emergence of new
‘revolutionary’ features of legislative politics and the preservation of
pre-revolutionary law.
We argue that the
pre-revolutionary practices of law-making on which the revolutionaries relied
shaped their strategies and, to some extent, the criteria by which they judged
the ultimate success of their revolutions. We argue that the performative
effect of revolutionary slogans should be perceived, at least in part, as a
continuity of pre-revolutionary legal and administrative practices. Our
comparative analysis of revolutionary law-making provides a more complex understanding
of the role of revolutions in modern state empowerment.
The Reviews, including a
Review Article, include:
- Paolo Napoli - A review article of Giorgio Agamben, Altissima povertà. Regole monastiche e forma di vita
- Arno Dal Ri Jr - A review of Ignazio Castellucci, Sistema juridico latinoamericano: una verifica
- Peter CH Chan - A review of Lei Chen and CH (Remco) van Rhee (eds), Towards a Chinese Civil Code: Comparative and Historical Perspectives
- Jasmin Hauck - A review of Irene Fosi, Papal Justice: Subjects and Courts in the Papal State, 1500–1750
- Dave De ruysscher - A review of Stefania Gialdroni, East India Company: una storia giuridica (1600–1708)
- Merike Ristikivi - A review of Heikki ES Mattila, Comparative Legal Linguistics: Language of Law, Latin and Modern Lingua Francas
- Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina - A review of Luigi Nuzzo, Origini di una scienza. Diritto internazionale e colonialismo nel XIX secolo
- Viviana Kluger - A review of José María Pérez Collados and Samuel Rodrigues Barbosa (eds), Juristas de la Independencia
- Abelardo Levaggi - A review of Rebecca J Scott and Jean M Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation
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