The ESCLH aims to promote comparative legal history and seeks affiliation with individuals and organisations with complementary aims.
Abstract:
Laws can promote, delay or prevent innovation. With regard to digitalisation and the development of artificial intelligence, fundamental legal policy questions are currently being raised as to whether legislation should set the course for future development at an early stage or whether it is better to allow development to run its course as freely as possible and then intervene with legislation in a targeted manner where undesirable effects occur that need to be corrected. This current challenge is not new. We also encounter it in legal history. Consider issues of economic and environmental law. Where legislation imposes high barriers on new technologies, the willingness to innovate is limited due to costs and risks. The expansion of transport routes in Europe took place at very different speeds, not least because of different legal frameworks. The same applies to the use of hydropower and canal construction. Where economic cooperation was prohibited for protectionist reasons and detailed production regulations applied, guild-based trade was limited to pure reproduction for many decades. Legal systems that did not recognize joint-stock companies hindered the growth of private companies because they lacked the equity financing function of joint-stock companies. Adherence to antiquated border regimes and customs regulations hampered foreign trade in many countries. The introduction of causal liability led to greater security for the population, but at the same time created higher risks for the introduction of new technologies. Price fixing and control of supply (monopoly rights) were intended to serve the supply of goods to the population, but hampered trade. There are many other examples relating to human rights, labour law, contract law (e.g. iustum pretium), copyright and patent law, etc. This issue aims to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of legal regulation for economic and technological innovations of all kinds in a legal-historical context. The editors welcome contributions from all relevant fields of science with a maximum length of 200,000 characters. Contributions should be submitted by using rechtskultur@ur.de within 31. August 2027. All contributions will be peer-reviewed, and admittance for publications rests on the merits of the contribution alone.
Read more here.
Coordination:
Alice Bonzom, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Triangle UMR 5206
Simon Castanié, Centre Roland Mousnier UMR 8596
Nicolas Picard, Centre d’histoire du xixe siècle UR 3550
Benoît Saint-Cast, LARHRA UMR 5190
Verónica Vallejo Flores, Mondes Américains UMR 8168
Argument
The temporality of justice is a topic that has not been explored much by social and law historians. Paradoxically, legal archives have more often been used to grasp the rhythms of ancient societies and the temporality of social practices [Voth, 2000] than to understand the relationship between justice and time. Yet the temporality of justice is no ordinary social and political time [Garapon, 1997]. Beyond the symbols and rituals that give majesty and authority to judgements, justice as a social activity has its own temporalities regulated by the law and the organisation of judicial work. The temporality of these actions is regulated by law and proceedings, which impose an order, deadlines and variable durations depending on the type of case or the status of the parties [Cerutti, 2020]. The practical dimension of this temporality can be observed in all the operations carried out daily in the courts: opening, investigating, adjourning, reassigning and closing cases. While the law imposes a timeframe on the resolution of disputes, judicial institutions remain permeable to external pressures and attentive to the needs of litigants. Far from being fixed, procedural rules are put into practice and used by the actors (judges, auxiliaries, litigants), who do not have the same interests and the same type of leeway. Judicial time is thus at the heart of a dialogue between institutions, society and the State. While the shortening of court proceedings and judgments has become a leitmotif of judicial reforms, little is known about what constitutes the time of justice.
In the wake of a conference organised in Lyon in October 2023, this Clio@Themis special issue aims to examine, from a historical perspective, the ways in which justice constructs its temporalities and how these relate to other forms of social times. The aim is not only to examine the legal and procedural dimensions of judicial time, but also to grasp its social, economic, political and even sensitive dimensions. In addition to the diversity of jurisdictions (civil, criminal, commercial, military, ecclesiastical, etc.), the chronological (early modern period to contemporary era) and geographical (Europe and the Americas) framework makes it possible to consider the varied spatial, temporal and cultural contexts on both sides of the Atlantic, to put the colonial phenomenon into perspective and to compare countries with common law and civil law traditions.
Proposals for articles may fall into one or more of the following (and non exhaustive) areas. Particular attention will be paid to proposals that emphasise both the social and legal dimensions of their subject, as wells as the actors, the practices and the spatial dimensions involved.
1. Justice and its temporalities, discourses and measurements
This first axis aims to examine the different ways in which historians and contemporaries have sought to evaluate and measure judicial time. How does the institution measure the temporality of its own actions? What are the effects of discourse on social representations, political reforms and institutional practices? Such questions also invite researchers to compare these measures with their own analyses. Reflecting on the timescale of justice requires not only the construction of empirical data but also a methodological reflection on the way in which these temporalities are apprehended. How can we count the time taken for proceedings? What tools can be used to understand the multiplicity of timeframes (those of litigants, of the procedure, of the institution)? What methods should be used to qualify these durations (compared with the average, the median, the parties’ expectations)?
2. Diversity of judicial times and uses of proceedings
Understanding judicial time means getting to the heart of the judicial proceeding mechanisms. While the civil or criminal jurisdiction, the nature of the disputes and the status of the litigants (body, class, gender, race) determine the form of the procedure and, as a result, the time limits associated with it, litigants, legal professionals and court officers nevertheless have some leeway when it comes to modulating time to suit their interests. What role do spoken words, writing, the cost of justice and legal professionals play in the construction of legal timeframes? What place does time occupy in the practices and strategies implemented by different actors? What weight does judicial time have in the reluctance to seek justice and the preference for extra-legal approaches?
3. Deciding, punishing, enforcing judgments
Judicial decisions take time and often include time provisions, whether in commercial, family or criminal matters. Is the speed or slowness of a decision correlated with its quality and effectiveness? Particularly in modern times, the question of the length of sentence has become the main instrument for responding to offences, both in the codes and in the verdicts actually pronounced. To what extent is time at the heart of the penal and/or prison experience? Into what spaces and in what ways is the sentence divided? What temporal arrangements and adjustments affect the execution of judicial decisions?
4. Reforms and crises: justice in ordinary and extra-ordinary time periods
The last axis aims to question the political dimension of judicial temporalities. To what extent does the codification of law and the unification of proceedings reduce the slowness of the judicial system? How does the modulation of the judicial network make it possible to regulate the time taken for proceedings and appeals? How does the justice system adapt its functioning to emergencies or extraordinary situations? In turn, can the inability of justice to adapt to ordinary social temporalities be seen as the symptom of a justice crisis? Or, on the contrary, is the discordance of social and judicial time an inherent contradiction in the exercise of justice?
How to submit
Proposals for articles (in French, English or Spanish) should be sent before1 September 2024 to the following address: temps.justice.2023@gmail.com.
Proposals should be approximately 500 words in length (excluding the bibliography) and should set out in detail the arguments of the proposed article, emphasising the angle of approach, the historiographical contribution, the method and the sources used. Particular attention will be paid to the way in which contributors’ proposals fit into the themes of this special issue and the spirit of the journal. A short bio-bibliography and bibliography should be included in proposals.
Publication schedule
Submission of article proposals: 1st September 2024.
Selection of proposals and coordinators’ feedbacks: 1st November 2024.
Submission of final articles on 1st April 2025 (instructions to authors are available here: https: //journals.openedition.org/cliothemis/2104).
First review of articles by the editorial board: June 2025.
Amended articles submission: 1st December 2025.
Second reviews of articles by the editorial board: 1st January 2026.
Final submission of articles: 15th April 2026.
Publication: June 2026 in Clio@Themis n°30/2026.
Call for contributions
The Journal for Digital Legal History (DLH) is a diamond Open-Access, peer-reviewed international journal hosted by the Open UGent platform. For our second issue, which will be published in November 2024, we are pleased to invite contributions from researchers working on legal history with digital, empirical and computational approaches. The journal welcomes all research questions and outputs at the intersection of legal history, digital humanities and empirical legal studies, broadly defined.
In the field of legal history, digital methods are hardly ever the centrepiece of a publication itself, if not downplayed. In 1997, Richard Evans claimed that: 'How we know about the past, what historical causation is, how we define a historical fact, whether there is such a thing as historical truth or objectivity - these are questions that most historians have happily left to one side as unnecessary distractions from their essential work in the archives' (R. Evans, In Defence of History, 1997, p. 9). Nevertheless, in the 21st century, the work of a historian or legal scholar does not stop in the archives. Often, digital or computational techniques are applied in seemingly pedestrian ways, such as "searching" full texts, or they are applied in more elaborate methods to transform the historical facts embedded in our precious archival material or legal documents to answer novel research questions or to explore well-trodden paths from an innovative perspective.
The application of digital techniques to legal history research is often overlooked or omitted from discussions on methodology. We encourage you to highlight the technical tools or methods that proved effective in your research projects without neglecting all the trials and errors that helped structure your final choice of any particular technique. You are welcome to illustrate your work with all forms of outputs, from notebooks to graphs, networks, maps, diagrams, etc.. If you have developed software, a database or a dataset that others could reuse, feel welcome to publish it with us.
2024 Call for Contributions: continuous call for submissions
Submissions that address legal sources from any historical period and any part of the world are welcome. We actively encourage collaborative and multi-authored pieces by authors from different countries working across disciplines.
We accept publications in English; we can also support German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but do contact the editorial board in advance. If you wish to publish in another language than mentioned here, please consult us beforehand.
Beyond the following suggestions, feel free to contact us through the DLH website if you have any original ideas that you want to discuss.
Topic suggestions
Original research articles (up to 10,000 words).
Reproduction pieces: Can the results of classic studies be replicated through DLH techniques?
A dedicated section for your Digital Legal History events: If you are organising a panel, conference, or webinar series that prominently features Digital Humanities performed on legal sources, contact us for a dedicated focus section that will allow you to publish the papers or conclusions of your meeting.
Shorter focus pieces or provocations (around 5,000 words with fewer footnotes).
Conference and seminar reports.
Spotlight articles: inspiration from other social sciences fields on the promising benefits of specific Digital Humanities techniques that could be successfully applied to Digital Legal History.
Presentations or Reviews of software, databases, datasets, websites, and platforms.
Tutorials: general presentation, application through a specific study angle (legal linguistics, marginalia analysis).
Trials & errors: reflections on the productive role of wandering and errors in abandoned, rejected or substantially modified past projects that could help improve the current methodology (inspired by the Journal of Trial & Error).
Formats
We are open to submissions in traditional and non-traditional formats: from traditional articles to blog posts, from plain text to linked data or hyperlinked texts, from posters to Notebooks, etc.. Illustrations could be included in the form of notebooks, graphs, diagrams, maps, networks, and images.
Timeline
Upon receiving your contribution, we aim to publish it within 2-4 months, depending on a positive peer-review. Please send us a short abstract of 150 words, including a provisional title, suggested format and up to five keywords. You can find the detailed guidelines for authors on the journal's website. Please include a short biographical statement for the proposed contributor(s), including the area of expertise, interests, affiliation (if applicable), and any other relevant information. We will respond to all abstract submissions within 14 days (in July and August, this may take a bit longer).
(Image source: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/rechtsgeschichte/brgoe)
Die "Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs - BRGÖ" sind eine peer reviewte Zeitschrift, die zweimal jährlich sowohl open access im Internet als auch im Druck im Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften erscheint. Sie bringt Beiträge zur allen Bereichen der Rechtsgeschichte (Verfassungsgeschichte, Privatrechtsgeschichte, Strafrechtsgeschichte, Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaften,...) vom Mittelalter bis ins 21. Jahrhundert. Der Begriff "Österreich" ist weit zu verstehen; auch Beiträge zu ehemals habsburgischen Ländern wie Böhmen, Ungarn, Galizien, Mailand oder Belgien, sowie zur Einbindung Österreichs in größere Einheiten, vom Heiligen Römischen Reich bis zur EU, sind herzlich willkommen! Angenommen können nur Originalbeiträge, die noch an keiner anderen Stelle publiziert oder zum Druck angenommen worden sind. Nähere Informationen zur Zeitschrift finden Sie hier:
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/rechtsgeschichte/brgoe
Besonders weisen wir Sie auf unsere ethischen Richtlinien und die Informationen zur peer review hin: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/kommissionen/rechtsgeschichte/pdf/publication_ethics_dt.pdf
Die Beiträge können in deutscher oder englischer Sprache eingereicht werden und sollten in der Regel 45.000 Zeichen (einschließlich Fußnoten und Leerzeichen) nicht übersteigen; nur in besonderen Fällen ist ein Abdruck auch längerer Beiträge möglich. Der Beitrag sollte eine Zusammenfassung in englischer Sprache (max. 1.000 Zeichen), sowie ca. 3-5 keywords in englischer Sprache umfassen. Die Autorinnen und Autoren werden gebeten, eine e-mail-Adresse, eine Postanschrift sowie ihre ORCID-Nummer (https://orcid.org) hinzuzufügen. Die Verwendung von Graphiken und Bildern in Farbe ist möglich und dort wünschenswert, wo dies der Unterstützung des Textes dient, sollte aber nicht für bloß illustrative Zwecke geschehen. Es wird in solchen Fällen gebeten, diese Graphiken/Bilder in einer separaten Datei mitzuschicken und im Manuskript die Stelle zu bezeichnen, an der die Graphik platziert werden soll.
Hinweise zur Manuskriptgestaltung und zu den Zitierrichtlinien finden Sie hier: https://www.oeaw.ac.at/fileadmin/kommissionen/rechtsgeschichte/pdf/zitierrichtlinien_dt.pdf
Beiträge für das kommende Heft mögen bis 1. September 2023 als
Word-Dokument per e-mail an thomas.olechowski@oeaw.ac.at
oder christoph.schmetterer@univie.ac.at
geschickt werden.
We learned of a call for
contributions to the 2022 issue of Rechtskultur.
Law and Reconstruction after
crisis will be the theme for the 2022 volume of Rechtskultur. The editors want
to focus on law as a tool for social engineering and how it has been applied to
reconstruct society after very different crises like the 30-years war, the
cholera pandemics or the fall of the Berlin Wall. The editors welcome
contributions from all relevant fields of science with a maximum length of 100
000 characters. Contributions should be submitted by using rechtskultur@ur.de
within 30. October 2022. All contributions will be peer reviewed, and
admittance for publications rests on the merits of the contribution alone. For
further information please visit our wegpage www.rechtskultur.org
2019 wird der achte Band der Zeitschrift "Rechtskultur - European Journal of Legal History - Journal européene d'histoire du droit" erscheinen. Themenschwerpunkt ist "Widerstand gegen Rechtsvereinheitlichung / Against Unification of law / Contre Unification du droit". Die Herausgeber laden Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aller einschlägigen Fachdisziplinen zur Einreichung von Beiträgen für Rechtskultur 8 (2019) ein.Board:
Die Beiträge sollen sich mit Bestrebungen zur Vereinheitlichung von Recht in Geschichte und Gegenwart aus der Perspektive von Gegenkräften befassen. Sie sollen einen Umfang von 100.000 Zeichen nicht überschreiten und bis zum 31. Oktober 2019 bei der Redaktion eingehen, die unter rechtskultur@ur.de erreichbar ist.
"Rechtskultur" steht Autoren aller einschlägigen Wissenschaftsdisziplinen ohne Ansehen des universitären Status offen. Kriterien sind allein Themenbezug und Qualität eines Aufsatzes. Alle Manuskripte werden einer beiderseits anonymen Begutachtung unterzogen (double-blind peer review).
Prof. Dr. Ignacio Czeguhn (FU Berlin); Prof. Dr. Lukas Gschwend (St. Gallen/Zürich); Prof. Dr. Dirk Heirbaut (Gent); Prof. Dr. Martin Löhnig (Regensburg); Prof. Dr. Antonio Sánchez Aranda (Granada)More information:
Weiter Informationen: http://www.edition-rechtskultur.de/ ISSN: 2568-4469
