CALL FOR PAPERS: Legal Unification through Jurisdiction? (DEADLINE: 15 July 2023)

Professor Löhnig has sent us the following call regarding a proposed edited collection on ‘legal unification through jurisdiction’.

CfP: Legal Unification through Jurisdiction?

Those who want to achieve territorial uniformity of law and thus create a uniform legal area can make use of various instruments. First and foremost is the instrument of legislation. A legislator who is superior to several legal areas can ensure legal unification through uniform legislation. If such a superior legislator does not exist, the law of several states can nevertheless be unified by the respective legislators enacting identical laws in a coordinated manner. However, legal unity can also be created by jurisprudence and legal education - as was the case in continental Europe up to the threshold of the 19th century; Savigny in particular had assigned the task of preserving and creating legal unity to it. Finally - and this will be the subject of this study - legal uniformity can also come about through jurisprudence or even be consciously striven for by creating a court that is superior to various legal areas. With the opening of the Reichsgericht in Leipzig on 1 October 1879, a unified supreme court was established in the German Empire. However, the creation of this court did not correspond to the creation of a uniform civil law for the empire. It took 20 years until the Civil Code, which is still in force today, came into force on 1 January 1900. How did the Imperial Court deal with the fragmentation of civil law? Did it faithfully apply the applicable particular law determined with the help of the rules of interlocal private law? Or did the court instead pursue "legal unification through jurisdiction"? And if so, by what means and in what areas? A few years ago I examined this question on the basis of the published jurisprudence of the Reichsgericht and showed how and in what areas this court actually pursued "legal unification through jurisdiction" between 1879 and 1899 and thus supported the "inner foundation of the Reich" (Löhnig, Rechtsvereinheitlichung durch Rechtsprechung? Zur Judikatur des Reichsgerichts 1879-1899, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2012 = Löhnig, La unificaciòn des Derecho Civil mediante la práctica jurisprudencial del Tribunal Supremo alemán (1879-1899), Dykinson, Madrid 2018).

The situation that existed in the German Reich for twenty years is no different from the situation in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, the Baltic States and (for a short time) Austria after 1918: there was a national supreme court, but no uniform codification of civil law and, moreover, no uniform codification of commercial and company law. So did the supreme courts of these states pursue "legal unification through jurisdiction" - and if so, how and in which areas of law? Moreover, lower courts may also have participated in "legal unification through jurisdiction"; a question I have not yet examined for the German Reich. Anna Klimaszewska (Gdańsk) drew my attention to a dictum by Mieczysław Honzatko in this regard. In the absence of developed legislation, jurisprudence in the former Russian partition territory was left to its own devices and applied the principles best suited to the needs of the market, which did not differ too much from those known to German law (Honzatko, Polski Kodeks Handlowy, Głos Prawa, nr 11/1933 r., pp. 635-636).

I would very much like to pursue the question of the "legal unification through jurisdiction" in the Central European states in the interwar period. To do so, I am dependent on the cooperation of numerous scholars from these states, with whom I would like to answer the above-mentioned question together, i.e. ultimately clarify what role jurisprudence had as a source of law. The more individual studies on specific areas of civil or commercial law and/or the activities of individual courts can be collected for each state, the better. For this reason, I would like to ask you for your cooperation and for the wide dissemination of this outline (also to young scholars or PhD students), and I hope that as many scholars as possible will declare their willingness to cooperate by 15 July 2023. Please send an email with a short outline of the topic and a CV to martin.loehnig@ur.de (I will reply by 31 July 2023 at the latest). In summer 2024, I would like to invite you to a meeting where we can discuss the results. Afterwards, the revised contributions will be published by a reputable academic publisher (Mohr Siebeck or BRILL).