JOURNAL: Comparative Legal History XIII (2025), nr. 2 (Dec)

(Image source:  Routledge)

Editorial (Agustín Parise & Matthew Dyson)  [OPEN ACCESS]

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579342

Doctrinal change in Mālikī law: the case of judicial divorce on account of harm (Ḍarar) (Mohammad Fadel)

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579343

Abstract:

This article explores doctrinal change in Mālikī law. Using the example of the distinctly Mālikī doctrine of a wife’s right to judicial divorce based on harm (ḍarar), it explores how this rule became the basic position of the school by no later than the eighth/fourteenth century, when Khalīl b Isḥāq included it in his authoritative Restatement of Mālikī law. The earliest sources of Mālikī law from the second/eighth century used the law of battery and principles of property law to protect a wife who suffered harm at the hands of her husband but did not provide her a right of divorce. Mālik, idiosyncratically, deemed the decision of the Quranic-mandated marital arbitrators to be binding. The combination of Mālikī commitments to a wife’s property rights, her right to bodily integrity and the broad powers they assigned to judges, beginning with marital arbitrators, along with the widespread inclusion in marriage contracts of covenants of good treatment that granted wives the right to divorce themselves if their husbands abused them, eventually led to the recognition of judicial divorce based on harm.

The Commercial Law for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1883: A legal transplant debate perspective (Mehmed Bećić)

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579472

Abstract:

The subject of this article is the Commercial Law for Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1883. This law represented a legal transplant of German commercial law. At the time of its adoption in 1883, the Commercial Law did not represent a mirror of society. However, archival sources point to the fact that the government did not actually aim to impose a law that reflected the socio-economic conditions or business and commercial practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The imposition of this legal transplant was aimed at unifying commercial law in a unified customs territory. A contextual analysis, based on archival sources, economic policies and economic history, confirmed that the government was interested in imposing precisely this kind of legal solution (legal transplant) to achieve specific legal, social and economic effects and transform the existing socio-legal and economic system of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Coverage of the Jewish people by legal solutions granting compensation related to population transfers in twentieth century Europe (Jan Wittlin)

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579473

Abstract: 

While population transfers were an inseparable part of European policy in the twentieth century, providing compensation for immovable property left behind faced formidable legal, political and economic challenges. Compensation schemes frequently failed to be implemented or left claims of significant groups of migrants or their descendants unsettled, often for several decades. The Jewish minorities, present in most European countries for many centuries and featuring a unique combination of ethnic, religious and nationality related factors were often amongst the most severely impacted. A comparative analysis of the legal frameworks of prominent cases in twentieth century Europe – the population exchanges between Greece and Türkiye in 1923, the post-war border shifts of Poland and the resulting Bug River claims, expulsions from former German territories after World War II and the loss of Carpathian Ruthenia by Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union – focuses on finding factors impacting Jewish communities, common solutions and evolutionary trends.

Constitutional nationalism and remembered history: the post-Soviet example (William Partlett)

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2579474

Abstract:

This article will argue that national history can further the project of constitutional self-government even in formerly authoritarian countries. Examining the former Soviet republics, it will describe how remembering forgotten or suppressed democratic constitutional ideas and arguments from national history can help support the project of constitutional self-government. This form of ‘constitutional nationalism’ counters arguments that constitutional self-government is a project of convergence with western best practices. It instead links it to long-standing national struggles to adapt the balanced constitution of constitutional self-government to the national context. ‘Constitutional nationalism’ therefore relies on a different approach to history. Rather than understanding national history in countries with a long history of authoritarianism as something to ignore or overcome, it views this history as a potential source of (often suppressed) ideas and inspiration for helping the project of constitutional self-government today.

Review Article

• International law and women’s history: historical methods for egalitarian scholarship. A Review of Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces?, edited by Immi Tallgren, Oxford University Press, 2023, 560 pp, $50 (paperback), ISBN 978-0198868460; Women, Their Lives, and the Law: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty, edited by Victoria Barnes, Nora Honkala, Sally Wheeler, Hart Publishing, 2023, 320 pp, $120 (hardback) ISBN 978-1509962082 (Sara L. Kimble)

Book Review

• The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law edited by Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, Patrick Olivelle, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024, 744 pp., $195 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1107035164 (Clifford Ando)
• Codifications of Late Antiquity: exclusive and universal by JHA Lokin, edited by Tom Von Bochove, Frits Brandsma, Anne-Marie Drummond and Pia Lokin-Sassen, Groningen, Chimaira/Eleven, 2023, 268 + XXXIX pp., €85.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-9462367203 (Emanuel van Dongen)
• La dynamique juridique des réseaux marchands: Hanses, nations, agences, filiales et comptoirs edited by Luisa Brunori, Toulouse, Presses de l’Université Toulouse Capitole, 2023, 338 pp., €25.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-2361702496 (Emily Kadens)
• La Comédie à la lumière du droit. France, Angleterre, Empire (1600–1800) by Gabrielle Vickermann-Ribémont, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2023, 890 pp., €47,00 (paperback), ISBN 978-2406148838 (Guillaume Cot)
• «Dans cette diversité des principes d’unité»: intrecci transnazionali nei sistemi di pubblicità immobiliare tra Otto e Novecento by Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina, Collana di studi di Storia del diritto medievale e moderno, Monografie, Vol 11, Rome, Historia et Ius, 2023, 360 pp., ISBN 9791281621015 (Gigliola di Renzo Villata)
• Die Rechtsnachfolge in Personengesellschaften im Deutschland und im Russland des 19. Jahrhunderts by Maria Malt, Münster, Lit Verlag, 2023, 230 pp., €49.90 hbk, ISBN 9783643152084 (Dmitry Poldnikov)
• La Société de législation comparée. Études sur 150 ans d’histoire edited by Nicolas Cornu Thénard and Sylvain Soleil, Paris, Société de législation comparée, 2023, 383 pp., €44 (paperback), ISBN 978-2365170949 (Laetitia Guerlain)
• The making and unmaking of ordoliberal language: a digital conceptual history of European competition law by Anselm Küsters, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 2023, 796 pp., €119.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-3465046011 (Viktorija Morozovaite)
• Sovereignty and religious freedom: a Jewish history by Simon Rabinovitch, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2024, 312 pp., $40 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0300246834 (Assaf Likhovski)
• Socialism and international law: the cold war and its legacies edited by Raluca Grosescu and Ned Richardson-Little, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, 304 pp., €120.92 (hardback), ISBN 978-0198920175 (Marek Jan Wasiński)
• Brexit, union, and disunion: the evolution of British constitutional unsettlement by Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 523 pp., £35 (paperback), ISBN 978-1108795340 (Donal K. Coffey)
• State liability and the law: a historical and comparative analysis by Bartłomiej Wróblewski, Abingdon, Routledge, 2023, 250 pp., £100.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1032354873 (Leo Boonzaier)
• Law and diversity: European and Latin American Experiences from a legal historical perspective, vol. 1: fundamental questions edited Peter Collin and Agustín Casagrande, Frankfurt am Main, Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie, 2023, xxi + 764 pp, €42.84 (Print on Demand ePubli), ISBN 978-3944773407 (Ignazio Castellucci)
• Elgar encyclopedia of comparative law. 3rd ed., edited by Jan M. Smits, Jaakko Husa, Catherine Valcke and Madalena Narciso, Cheltenham (UK) & Northampton (MA, USA), Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023, 1736 pp., 3 volumes, £1,025 (hardback), ISBN 978-1839105593 (William Barbey)

More information can be find here.