CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: 4rd Central and Eastern European Legal History Conference, University of Belgrade - Faculty of Law, 19-21 May 2027, Deadline for Applications: 15 December 2026

By ZoranCvetkovic - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35741729

The Central and Eastern European Legal History Conference (CEELHC), first

organized in 2019 in Wien, second in 2023 in Budapest and again 2025 in Cracow,

will take place next year in Belgrade. It will be hostedat the Faculty of Law Belgrade

University.

 

We want to invite all interested scholars to take part in our conference. Registrations

is open to all reserchers who deal with Central and Eastern European legal history and

political doctrines. We ask you to submit only contributions that are thematically

relatred to the broadly conceived legal history of Central and Eastern Europe.

 

The conference language will be English and the conference fee is 200 EUR.

 

In addition, there will be an opportunitty to submit contributions to the journals:

“Annals of the Faculty of Law in Belgrade”, “Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte

Österreichs”, “Pázmány Law Review” and "Krakowskie Studia z Historii Państwa i Prawa".

Contributions will only be accepted in English.

 

We ask that you submit your proposal (abstract up to 300 words) by December 15 2026.

Information regarding the acceptance of proposal will be sent by the end of January

2027, at the latest.

Contact information: ceelhc2027@ius.bg.ac.rs

BOOK: Michał GALEDEK and Anna TARNOWSKA, Shaping the Congress Kingdom of Poland (1815–1830). The Interconnectivity of Constitutional and Liberal Ideas in Europe after Napoleon [Legal History Library, eds. Dirk HEIRBAUT, Michelle MCKINLEY, Matthew C. MIROW & C.H. VAN REE; vol. 79] (Leiden/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff/Brill, 2025), ISBN 978-90-04-73992-5, € 191,18

 

(image source: Brill)

Abstract:

Should the dispute over the interpretation of the 1815 constitution of Congress Poland be considered a key factor that shaped Polish political liberalism, and if so, why? The authors of this volume explore this question against the backdrop of constitutional development in post-Napoleonic Europe. The aim of this book is to illustrate the mutual interdependence between political liberalism and constitutionalism after the Congress of Vienna and to examine how Western European constitutional and liberal ideas intermingled with traditional Polish aristocratic republicanism.

On the authors:

Michał Gałędek, Dr. iur. (2010), Dr. hab. iur. (2018), is Professor and Chair of the Department of Legal History at the University of Gdańsk, as well as Vice-President for Science of the Polish Society for Legal History. His most recent monograph is Ideology and Private Law: Polish Experiences in the Long 20th Century (Brill, 2025). Anna Tarnowska, Dr. iur (2007), Dr hab. iur. (2020), is Professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń's Department of the History of Legal and Political Thought and German Law, Chairwoman of the Legal-Economic Chapter of the Scientific Society in Toruń, and Vice-President of the Polish Society for Legal History. She has authored numerous books and articles on legal history and constitutionalism. 

Read more here: DOI 10.1163/9789004739925. 

CONFERENCE: Legal Unification through Case Law? (Regensburg: University of Regensburg, Institute for East European Law, 21 - 22 NOV 2024)

 

 

Conference program:

21. November 2024 (2 p.m.)

Introduction (Martin Löhnig)

Legal harmonisation between Austria and Germany before the amendments to the ABGB (Kamila Staudigl-Ciechowicz)

The ABGB in the case law of the VIII. Civil Senate of the German Reichsgericht 1939 - 1945 (Martin Löhnig)

The British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (David Schorr)

22. November 2024 (9 a.m)

The Role of the Hungarian Royal Curia in the Unification of Private Law between the Two World Wars  (László Ádám Joó)

The Supreme Court for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the unification of judicial practice (Mehmed Becic)

The Supreme Court of the Second Polish Republicon Civil Status Records: A Case Law Review (Bartosz Kamil Truszkowski)

Registration:

rechtskultur@ur.de

Organized by:

Prof. Dr. Martin Löhnig (University of Regensburg)

Conference venue:

Institut für Ostrecht/Institute for East European Law
Landshuter Str. 4
D-93047 Regensburg

Find more information here.

CONFERENCE: Legal Unification through Case Law? (Regensburg: University of Regensburg, Institute for East European Law, 21 - 22 NOV 2024)

 

Conference program:

21. November 2024 (2 p.m.)

Introduction (Martin Löhnig)

Legal harmonisation between Austria and Germany before the amendments to the ABGB (Kamila Staudigl-Ciechowicz)

The ABGB in the case law of the VIII. Civil Senate of the German Reichsgericht 1939 - 1945 (Martin Löhnig)

The British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (David Schorr)

22. November 2024 (9 a.m)

The Role of the Hungarian Royal Curia in the Unification of Private Law between the Two World Wars  (László Ádám Joó)

The Supreme Court for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the unification of judicial practice (Mehmed Becic)

The Supreme Court of the Second Polish Republicon Civil Status Records: A Case Law Review (Bartosz Kamil Truszkowski)

Registration:

rechtskultur@ur.de

Organized by:

Prof. Dr. Martin Löhnig (University of Regensburg)

Conference venue:

Institut für Ostrecht/Institute for East European Law
Landshuter Str. 4
D-93047 Regensburg

Find more information here.

BOOK: John CONNELLY, From Peoples into Nations. A History of Eastern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 968 p., ISBN 9780691167121, 30 GBP

 

(image source: Princeton UP)

Abstract:

In the 1780s, the Habsburg monarch Joseph II decreed that henceforth German would be the language of his realm. His intention was to forge a unified state from his vast and disparate possessions, but his action had the opposite effect, catalyzing the emergence of competing nationalisms among his Hungarian, Czech, and other subjects, who feared that their languages and cultures would be lost. In this sweeping narrative history of Eastern Europe since the late eighteenth century, John Connelly connects the stories of the region’s diverse peoples, telling how, at a profound level, they have a shared understanding of the past. An ancient history of invasion and migration made the region into a cultural landscape of extraordinary variety, a patchwork in which Slovaks, Bosnians, and countless others live shoulder to shoulder and where calls for national autonomy often have had bloody effects among the interwoven ethnicities. Connelly traces the rise of nationalism in Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman lands; the creation of new states after the First World War and their later absorption by the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Bloc; the reemergence of democracy and separatist movements after the collapse of communism; and the recent surge of populist politics throughout the region. Because of this common experience of upheaval, East Europeans are people with an acute feeling for the precariousness of history: they know that nations are not eternal, but come and go; sometimes they disappear. From Peoples into Nations tells their story.

On the author:

John Connelly is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History and director of the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education and From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews. He lives in Kensington, California. 

 Read more here.

BOOK: Grischa VERCAMER and Dušan ZUPKA, Rulership in Medieval East Central Europe. Power, Ritual and Legitimacy in Bohemia, Hungary and Poland (Leiden: Brill, 2021). ISBN: 978-90-04-49980-5, € 166.00

(Source: Brill)

ABOUT THE BOOK

Series: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, Volume: 78

 

This book provides the first detailed overview of research on rulership in theory and practice, with a particular emphasis on the monarchies of Bohemia, Hungary and Poland in the High and Late Middle Ages. The contributions examine the legitimation of rule of the first local dynasties, the ritual practice of power, the ruling strategies and practices of power in the established monarchies, and the manifold influences on the rulership in East Central Europe from outside the region (such as from Byzantium, and the Holy Roman Empire). The collection shows that these ideas and practices enabled the new polities to become legitimate members of Latin Christendom.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Grischa Vercamer, Ph.D. (2008, Freie Universität Berlin), habilitation (2016), is Professor at the Technical University of Chemnitz. He has published monographs, articles, and collective volumes on the High and Late Middle Ages, including Perception of Good and Bad Power/Rulers in England, Poland and the Holy Roman Empire in the 12th century in the Historiography (Harrassowitz, 2020). 

Dušan Zupka, Ph.D. (2009, Comenius University in Bratislava) is Assistant Professor at that same University. He has published monographs and articles on power, rulership, and communication in medieval East Central Europe, including Ritual and Symbolic Communication in Medieval Hungary under the Árpád Dynasty, 1000–1301 (Brill, 2016).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments 
List of Figures and Maps 
Notes on Contributors 

PART 1: Introduction

1 Rulership in Medieval East Central Europe 
  Dušan Zupka 

2 Rulership and Power in Western Medieval Europe (A Theoretical and Conceptual Introduction) 
  Grischa Vercamer 

PART 2: Legitimacy and Rulership – Beginning and Development of the First Dynasties in the Early and High Middle Ages

3 After Avars: The Beginning of the Ruling Power on the Eastern Fringe of Carolingian Empire 
  Martin Wihoda 

4 The Rulership of the Árpádian Dynasty in the 10th–13th Centuries 
  Márta Font 

5 The Piast Rulership 
  Zbigniew Dalewski 

PART 3: Ritual and Politics: Established Rulership in the High and Late Middle Ages

6 Political, Religious and Social Framework of Religious Warfare and Its Influences on Rulership in Medieval East Central Europe 
  Dušan Zupka 

7 The Ritual Practice of Power in Bohemia during the 14th Century 
  Robert Antonín 

8 Language of Power and Communication in the Piast Dynasty: Toward a Reappraisal of Polish Political Culture of the 12th–13th Century 
  Marcin R. Pauk 

9 Assemblies in the Holy Roman Empire and the East Central European Kingdoms: A Comparative Essay on Political Participation and Representation 
  Julia Burkhardt 

PART 4: Structures of Power in the Late Middle Ages

10 The Irruption of the Sacred into the History of Hungarian Kings in the Mirror of the Angevin “Illuminated Chronicle” (around 1358) 
  Vinni Lucherini 

11 The Last Piasts: Legitimating Royal Rule in Fourteenth Century Poland 
  Paul W. Knoll 

12 Royal Power and Military Administration in Angevin Hungary 
  Attila Bárány 

13 Governance System in Poland during the 15th Century 
  Bożena Czwojdrak 

PART 5: Influences on Rulership in East Central Europe from Outside

14 Byzantium and East Central Europe: A Brief Outline of Political and Cultural Relations 
  Panos Sophoulis 

15 The Kingdom of Rus’: Towards a New Theoretical Model of Rulership in Medieval Europe 
  Christian Raffensperger 

16 The “Mongol Experience” of East Central Europe in Image and Political Reality during the Later Middle Ages 
  Felicitas Schmieder 

17 Holy Roman Empire and East Central Europe (High Middle Ages): Politics and Influences 
  Grischa Vercamer 

18 The Holy Roman Empire and East Central Europe (Late Middle Ages): Politics and Influences 
  Stephan Flemmig 

19 Authority without Power? Papal Rulership over East Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages 
  Monika Saczyńska-Vercamer 

General Bibliography 
Index 

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: William E. Butler & Oleksiy V. Kresin (Eds.), Discovering the Unexpected: Comparative Legal Studies in Eastern and Central Europe (Clark, New Jersey: Talbot Publishing, 2021).p. ISBN: 9781616196554, pp. 562, $ 150

(Source: Talbot Publishers)

ABOUT THE BOOK

A title in the JCL Studies in Comparative Law, Second Series. 

Comparative lawyers from Belarus, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the United States explore the contributions of Eastern and Central European comparatists mostly unknown outside the region in 25 essays addressing individuals, processes and institutions from the sixteenth century to recent times. Most names will be unfamiliar to comparative lawyers not from the region; some overlap in their geographical affiliation and the boundaries of the region itself are controversial. Several contributors give attention to Slavic law and its place within historical comparative studies. New light is cast on the development of comparative legal studies during the Soviet era and some of the principal personalities involved. 

ABOUT THE EDITORS

William E. Butler is the John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor of Law, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University; Emeritus Professor of Comparative Law, University of London (University College London); Foreign Member, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine. 

Oleksiy Kresin is a leading Ukrainian comparative lawyer; Head, Center of Comparative Jurisprudence, Koretsky Institute of State and Law, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Secretary-General, Ukrainian Association of Comparative Jurisprudence; President, Ukrainian National Committee, International Association of Legal Sciences; Associate, International Academy of Comparative Law. 

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Oleksiy V. KRESIN, Comparative Law In Warsaw, 1800-1835 (Edited and Translated by William E. Butler) (Clark, New Jersey: Talbot Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-61619-658-5, pp. 242, $ 95

(Source: Talbot Publishers)

ABOUT THE BOOK

A title in the JCL Studies in Comparative Law, Second Series. 

The Partitions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) and Napoleon’s invasions of Central and Eastern Europe (1806–1813) made the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth an unexpected recipient of legal traditions and substantive law imposed by conquering neighbors. At the same time the science of comparative law was beginning to develop. Influenced by these events and a keen interest in German legal thought and French codification, Polish jurists debated the appropriate balance of imported versus autochthonic law, the proper role of legal education, the development of a legal consciousness and the social role of the jurist. This is the first comprehensive study in English to examine the genesis of comparative legal studies in Poland, and Polish contributions to that field, during this decisive era in European history.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Oleksiy Kresin is a leading Ukrainian comparative lawyer; Head, Center of Comparative Jurisprudence, Koretsky Institute of State and Law, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Secretary-General, Ukrainian Association of Comparative Jurisprudence; President, Ukrainian National Committee, International Association of Legal Sciences; Associate, International Academy of Comparative Law.

William E. Butler is the John Edward Fowler Distinguished Professor of Law, Dickinson School of Law, Pennsylvania State University; Emeritus Professor of Comparative Law, University of London (University College London); Foreign Member, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine.

More information with the publisher.

BOOK: Ville ERKKILA and Hans-Peter HAFERKAMP, eds., Socialism and Legal History The Histories and Historians of Law in Socialist East Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2020). ISBN 9780367414757, GBP 120.00

(Source: Routledge)

Routledge is publishing a new book on legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War.

ABOUT THE BOOK

This book focuses on the way in which legal historians and legal scientists used the past to legitimize, challenge, explain and familiarize the socialist legal orders, which were backed by dictatorial governments.

The volume studies legal historians and legal histories written in Eastern European countries during the socialist era after the Second World War. The book investigates whether there was a unified form of socialist legal historiography, and if so, what can be said of its common features. The individual chapters of this volume concentrate on the regimes that situate between the Russian, and later Soviet, legal culture and the area covered by the German Civil Code. Hence, the geographical focus of the book is on East Germany, Russia, the Baltic states, Poland and Hungary. The approach is transnational, focusing on the interaction and intertwinement of the then hegemonic communist ideology and the ideas of law and justice, as they appeared in the writings of legal historians of the socialist legal orders. Such an angle enables concentration on the dynamics between politics and law as well as identities and legal history.

Studying the socialist interpretations of legal history reveals the ways in which the 20th century legal scholars, situated between legal renewal and political guidance gave legitimacy to, struggled to come to terms with, and sketched the future of the socialist legal orders.

The book will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers working in the areas of Legal History, Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law and European Studies.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Ville Erkkilä is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for European Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland.

Hans-Peter Haferkamp is Full Professor of Private Law and History of German Law. He is the Director of the Institute of Modern History of Private Law, German and Rhenish Legal History, University of Cologne

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Socialist interpretations of legal history
Ville Erkkilä

PART I Framing the socialist legal historiography

1 The transformations of some classical principles in socialist Hungarian civil law: The metamorphosis of ‘bona fides’ and ‘boni mores’ in the Hungarian Civil Code of 1959
András Földi

2 We few, we happy few? Legal history in the GDR
Martin Otto

3 Roman law studies in the USSR: An abiding debate on slaves, economy and the process of history
Anton Rudokvas and Ville Erkkilä

4 Strategies of covert resistance: Teaching and studying legal history at the University of Tartu in the Soviet era
Marju Luts-Sootak

5 The Western legal tradition and Soviet Russia: The genesis of H. J. Berman’s Law and Revolution
Adolfo Giuliani

PART II Legal historians of socialist regimes

6 Juliusz Bardach and the agenda of socialist history of law in Poland
Marta Bucholc

7 Valdemārs Kalniņš (1907–1981): The founder of Soviet legal history in Latvia
Sanita Osipova

8 Getaway into the Middle Ages?: On topics, methods and results of ‘socialist’ legal historiography at the University of Jena
Adrian Schmidt-Recla and Zara Luisa Gries

9 Roman law and socialism: Life and work of a Hungarian scholar, Elemér Pólay
Éva Jakab

More info here

CONFERENCE: Law and Legality in Modern Eastern Europe (4-5 October 2019, Princeton)

(Source: Princeton)

In the coming two days, the Department of History at Princeton is organizing a conference on Law and Legality in Modern Eastern Europe.

Here the programme:

Program

Friday, October 4, 2019

1:15 p.m. Welcome and Introductions

Emily Greble  (Vanderbilt University)

Iryna Vushko (Princeton University)

1:30 p.m. - 3:15 p.m. Politics of Punishment in the Habsburg and Russian Empires

Chair: Emily Greble

Alison Frank  (Harvard University), “The Emperor and the Executioner: Justice, Mercy, and Capital Punishment in the Habsburg Monarchy”

Iryna Vushko (Princeton University), “Imperial Golgotha: Spielberg Prison in the Habsburg Empire”

Daniel Beer  (Royal Holloway), “Rituals of Civil Death: Sovereignty and Subversion in the Reign of Alexander II”

Commentator: Ekaterina Pravilova (Princeton University)

3:15 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Coffee Break

3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Overlapping and Contested Sovereignties

Chair: Iryna Vushko

Natasha Wheatley (Princeton University), “Sovereignty as a Knowledge Problem”

Aimee Genell  (Western Georgia University), “From the Legalist Empire to the Sovereign State”

Emily Greble (Vanderbilt University), “Debating Concepts of Sovereignty: Muslims in Post-Ottoman Europe”

Dominique Reill  (University of Miami), “Eeeny, Meeny, Miny, Law: Law-Making and Self-Determination in Absence of a State”

Commentator: Lauren Benton  (Vanderbilt University)

6:30 p.m. Dinner

Saturday, October 5, 2019

8:30 a.m. - 9 a.m. Breakfast

9 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. International Law and Regional Implications

Chair: Emily Greble

Peter Holquist  (University of Pennsylvania), “Testing the New ‘Laws of War’: Imperial Russia and the 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War”

Jared Manasek  (Pace University), “Occupation, Sovereignty, and the Presumption of Legality: the “Forgotten” Ottoman Exclave of Ada Kale in the Danube International Waterway”

Kent Schull  (State University of New York, Binghamton), “Repatriating POWs in Post-Great War Eastern Europe: Negotiating Citizenship & Belonging in the Wake of Dismantled Empires, New Nation States & Imperial Ambitions”

Commentator: Eric Weitz  (The City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY)

10:45 a.m. - 11 a.m. Coffee Break

11 a.m. - 12:45 p.m. The Transformation of the East European Legal Order in the Twentieth Century

Chair: Iryna Vushko

Gábor Egry  (Institute of Political History, Budapest), “The Law of the State, the State of the Nation: the Idea of the Nation and the Transformation of Legal Categories in Interwar Eastern Europe”

Melissa Feinberg  (Rutgers University), “The Dilemmas of De-Austrianization: Family and Marriage Law in the First Czechoslovak Republic”

Rebecca Reich  (Cambridge University), “Journalism and Judgment in the Post-Stalin Period”

Commentator: Benjamin Nathans  (University of Pennsylvania)

1 p.m. Concluding Lunch

All info on the conference here

CONFERENCE: Early Modern Natural Law in Eastern Europe (Erfurt, 21-23 November 2019)

(Source: Uni Erfurt)

We learned of a conference on early modern natural law in Eastern Europe at the Universität Erfurt.

“Early-Modern Natural Law in Eastern Europe”

Conference of the Network on Natural Law 1625-1850

Research Centre for Early-Modern Natural Law

Max Weber Centre, Erfurt

21-23 November 2019

In 2019, the Network’s conference is being organised by Gábor Gángó and Knud Haakonssen. The theme is the reception of natural law during the early-modern period in the political cultures to the east of the German Empire. In keeping with the programme of the Network, the conference is inter-disciplinary in its approach and is mainly, but not exclusively, focussed on academic natural law. Natural law in Eastern Europe has only be explored to a limited degree, and the conference will open up for new research by  papers devoted to natural law teaching in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Elbląg, Toruń, Prague, Vienna, Tyrnau (Trnava), Sárospatak and Klausenburg (Cluj-Napoca). The particular character of natural law discussions in the different religious and political contexts of Eastern Europe will be highlighted, as indicated by the titles in the programme.

Venue: Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Steinplatz 2, Erfurt.

Registration: The meeting is free and open for all interested, but we ask you to register by e-mail to Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen: mikkel.jensen@uni-erfurt.de

The program can be found here

More info here

WORKSHOP: Socialist interpretations of legal history. The histories and historians of law and justice in the GDR, Poland and the Baltic states under the reign of communism (22-23 MAR 2019)

(image source: helsinki)

The aim of the workshop at hand is to concentrate on the interaction between historians and communist regimes, but rather than investigating the control exercised by the communist states, we focus on the position of legal historians and their representations of history. How did the historians see the recent past, and how did that affect their vision on the future? What elements remained from the era preceding communism, and with what means did the scholars find leeway between strict ideological preconditions and their scholarly identity? 

After the Second World War, the Soviet occupied Eastern part of Germany, Poland and Baltic States all experienced – in a varying thoroughness – a drastic reorganization of higher education, which was purported to root socialist worldview to their respective academia. Consequently, in the following years also legal scholars advertised the anti-fascist, peaceable and democratizing characteristics of socialist law as an antidote to all what the western legal system supposedly encouraged and embodied. At the same time western continental legal science concentrated on the long lines of legal history, constructing its view as an exact opposite to what started to take shape as the socialist legal science. 

Rather than treating legal history and jurisprudence as mere political tools of the communist regimes, our workshop at hand focuses on the history of the scholarly representations of legal history and jurisprudence. We presume that writing the history of a community or a legal system left free space for scholars to express themselves as scientists, citizens and temporal subjects, even in communist regimes. Furthermore, we argue that this space for personal interpretation becomes evident in the works of the legal historians and legal scientists. The workshop is being arranged in a cooperation by the Centre of Excellence 'Law, Identity and the European Narratives' at the University of Helsinki and The Institut für neuere Privatrechtsgeschichte, University of Cologne. The workshop attempts to bring together scholars and approaches from variety of disciplines and fields of study. Our confirmed key-note speakers are Michal Kopecek (Jena/Prague), Marianna Muravyeva (Helsinki) and Lauri Mälksoo (Tartu). In order to analyze the ‘socialist interpretations of legal history’ in different times and regions across the Eastern Central Europe and former USSR, our workshop concentrates on (but is not restricted to) the following characteristics of socialist legal science and historiography. 

The Past, the Present and the Future in socialist legal history. What kind of narratives did the scholars reconstruct to their respected legal orders, or in general to European legal culture? How did they posit their narratives vis-à-vis the western story of European legal history, or which parts they rebuked in that narrative of the West? What were the foundational periods or agents in the socialist reconstructions and why so? 

Concepts and tropes. Where there key-concepts, tropes and metaphors in socialist legal history, and if so, where they transnational in nature or did they remain as local inventions of a national legal discipline? By whom and when they were introduced? 

The Networks and Schools in the jurisprudence of the GDR, Poland and Baltic states of the former USSR. How did the legal scholars of the former communist regimes organized themselves? Where there competing approaches to and paradigm shifts within the discipline of legal history? 

Continuities and discontinuities in socialist legal historiography. In what ways did the legal historical scholarship “started from the scratch” after 1945, distinct from bourgeois worldview and previous historical narratives? What stayed over from the inter-war period and what was rejected? How the further change in political and social conditions of the communist regimes affected legal historiography?

March 22, 2019

13.45–14.00 Ville Erkkilä, Hans-Peter Haferkamp: Opening remarks

14.00–15.00 Keynote speech, Michal Kopecek (Jena/Prague): The Socialist Conception of Human Rights and its Dissident Critique. East Central Europe 1960s-1980s.

15.00–15.30 Martin Otto (Hagen): We few, we happy few? Legal History in the GDR

15.30–16.00 Adolfo Giuliani (Helsinki): Eastern Europe and the legal historian. Changing images of the Eastern legal tradition: Roman law, canon law, Pandektism and anti-Pandektism.

16.15–17.15 Keynote speech, Marianna Muravyeva (Helsinki): TBA

17.15–17.45 Marju Luts–Sootak (Tallinn): Strategies of covert resistance in teaching and studying legal history at the University of Tartu in the Soviet era.

March 23, 2019

10.30–11.30 Keynote speech, Lauri Mälksoo (Tartu): The Concept of Human Rights in the Soviet Legal and Political Thinking.

11.30–12.00 Sanita Osipova (Riga): Valdemars Kalnins (1907-1981) – the founder of the Soviet legal history in Latvia.

13.30–14.00 Adrian Schmidt-Recla (Jena): Getaway into the Middle Ages? Topics, methods and results of socialist legal historiography in Jena

14.00–14.30 Martha Bucholc (Bonn): TBA

14.30–15.00 Anton Rudokvas (St.Petersburg): Roman law studies in the USSR

15.15–15.45 Diana Kudaibergenova (Lund): TBA

15.45–16.15 Ville Erkkilä (Helsinki): Law, Land and Community. Historicizing the socialist land reform in East Germany

(more information here)