JOURNAL: "Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History" (issue 24, 2016)

Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History issue 24

The most recent issue of the journal of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has just been released and is now available online in open access and in print.

Rg 24 is dedicated to the concept of translation:

The research section opens the issue with a contribution from Gerhard Dilcher that has been translated into English: »The Germanists and the Historical School of Law: German Legal Science between Romanticism, Realism, and Rationalization«. This article is followed by an analysis by Jakob Zollmann that sheds light on an almost forgotten legal historical phenomenon, »Austrägalgerichtsbarkeit - Interstate Dispute Settlement in a Confederate Arrangement, 1815 to 1866«. Finally, Pedro Cardim addresses the expansive and fundamental field of research within legal history focusing on European empires, in particular the status of the overseas territories of the Iberian monarchy in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

The first focus section, »Translators: Mediators in Legal Transfers«, deals with cultural translators of normativity, and the second focus, »Legal History in Action: Laying Down Indigenous Customs in Writing«, treats the translation of legal customs into writing – a translation into another medium. Such processes of translation may very well represent a key to understanding local, national, regional, or even global legal histories; however, in the past they have simply received insufficient consideration.

The two forum sections strive to provide a snapshot of a broad discussion concerning issues important to legal historical research. The first one poses the following question: what kind of research results can be expected from the much discussed »Digital Humanities«? In the second forum, legal historians were asked to assess the »State and Perspectives of the History of Social Law«.

In the critique section, important works within legal historical research published within the last two years are discussed, several of which also deal with translation. As always, we have again done our best to discuss as many publications as possible in a language other than that in which they were written. Journals are indeed also translators.

Click here to get to the Rg website, where you will find all contributions online in open access, or you can order a hardcopy directly from the publisher.