BOOK REVIEW: Giulio ABBATE, Legal education in the western world: a cultural and comparative history, by Rogelio PÉREZ-PERDOMO (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 174-180)

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Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo's work provides a comparative and historical account of legal education in the Western world, from ancient Rome to the present day. Following the traditional division of comparative law, it addresses both the civil and common law traditions, focusing on changes in legal education over the centuries and the interrelations between the two traditions in contemporary times. 

Adopting a longue durée perspective, the book presents itself as an 'introduction to a cultural and comparative history of the law' (1), and it achieves its purpose. Alongside the historical analysis of legal education through its main features, the book examines the interactions between legal education and its social and intellectual context, also focusing on 'the social role of the most important legal actors' (1) - legal professionals. 

This work demonstrates that legal education is, and has always been, inseparable from the ideas and concepts of law, its historical development and its social function. Law possesses a constitutive social force.' It has been a factor in the ordering and disciplining of society. Legal education, in turn, 'is linked to the law as a way of ordering society and to the conceptualisation of the law itself' (1), playing a significant social role. 

Pérez-Perdomo's work goes further, aiming to clarify the role of legal education in organising law and maintaining legal tradition. This methodological approach defines the first chapter of the book, which addresses the civil law tradition. The chapter's primary aim is to demonstrate the relationship between legal education and the conception of law, from classical Rome to Justinian. It outlines the gradual development of the legal field and the organisation of methods for legal knowledge and its transmission. These points are discussed particularly with reference to the opinions of the jurisconsults, which structured legal knowledge and contributed to the transformation of the legal field in response to the changing needs of Roman society. Legal education, in turn, reflected the prevailing concept of law. And 'once the law was consolidated as an intellectual discipline' (11), legal education subsequently assumed a more formal character. 

The work then examines the changes that occurred under Justinian's rule. The promulgation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis significantly altered the concept of law, which became identified exclusively with the written document sanctioned by political authority. As a result, the author argues, law became detached from […]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671641

BOOK REVIEW: Marjorie CARVALHO DE SOUZA, Punishment, labour and the legitimation of power, eds. Adam S FAGBORE, Nabhojeet SEN and Katherine ROSCOE (Routledge: Abingdon, 2025) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 169-172)

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Punishment, Labour and the Legitimation of Power, edited by Adam S. Fagbore, Nabhojeet Sen, and Katherine Roscoe, is the second volume in the series Social History of Punishment and Labour Coercion, initially published by Amsterdam University Press and now under Routledge. The series intends to be a 'platform for expansive understandings' of both punishment and labour coercion. By 'expansive', the series editors mean the analysis of a broad range of forms of punishment, enforced either by state apparatuses or non-state actors, as well as a wide spectrum of labour regimes, from wage labour and enslavement to indenture, tribute, convict, or unpaid labour. 

This collective volume reflects that ambition not only in its thematic range, which includes under the notion of 'punishment' practices such as imprisonment, branding, banishment, convict labour, debt bondage, and penal servitude, but also in its geographical and temporal coverage. Overall, it spans over five millennia across four continents, from ancient Mesopotamia to eighteenth-century Japan, China, and Mongolia, and from Merovingian Gaul to nineteenth-century Portuguese Africa. 

A rich introductory essay by the volume's three editors provides the framing for these diverse themes, geographies, and temporalities. They establish theoretical unity via a ‘Trans-cultural and Trans-epochal Perspective on Labour Mobility,’ defining the term not only as the capacity to move but also as the mobilisation into coerced labour. 

The essays are organised into three clearly defined analytical axes, each comprising three chapters, which together trace three distinct temporal arcs from antiquity to the contemporary period. 

Part I examines the relationship between punishment and the production of labour relations, both in its role of sustaining existing labour regimes and also in generating new ones. It includes contributions that explore punishment as a means of facilitating well-known shifts between labour systems, such as the end of slavery in the Atlantic world, but also as a mechanism for managing the workforce in less familiar contexts of heightened labour demand, such as ancient Egypt. 

It is from this latter historical context that the section opens, with Adam Simon Fagbore's study of Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt. This contribution examines the central government's attempts to immobilise personnel within protected royal and temple endowments through a broad range of punitive practices, which targeted not only field labourers but also local officials who failed to […]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671638

BOOK REVIEW: Milan KUHLI, Strafgesetzbücher der Zwischenkriegszeit, eds. Arnd KOCH and Martin LÖHNIG (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2024) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 166-168)

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This compilation, edited by Arnd Koch and Martin Löhnig, deals with criminal law discourses and legislation in the early twentieth century. It refers to the interwar period (Zwischenkriegszeit), the period between the two World Wars (1918- 39). However, it is obvious that this period of legal history can only be comprehended if a broader temporal context is considered. Therefore, some of the case studies comprised in the book reflect issues concerning historical development between the mid-nineteenth century (eg in the article by Marju Luts-Sootak and Marin Sedman on the legal situation in Estonia) and the 1960s (eg in Danuta Janicka's account about Poland). Except for one article written in English (by Luts-Sootak and Sedman), the compilation is in German. 

What is not apparent from the title of the anthology is the fact that the book focuses on legislation and discourse in Central and Eastern Europe. So, apart from an introductory article by Löhnig, the anthology comprises seven studies about the legal situation in individual territories in this European region. Attila Barna's article deals with the Hungarian criminal law, focussing on reform initiatives from 1908 and 1928. The latter reformed inter alia the system of fines and brought in the concept of the so-called serious criminal (Schwerverbrecher) which reflected discourses that could also be found in Germany during this time. Janicka's article deals with Poland, especially with the discussion about legal unification around 1918 and with the international network within which the debate took place. Furthermore, she shows the links to the concepts of the classical school of criminal law and to those of the sociological, 'modern' school. Koch addresses the history of Germany between 1919 and 1933, the so-called Weimar Republic. He notes that the project to comprehensively reform the German criminal code from 1871 (Reichsstrafgesetzbuch) failed during this period, but emphasises that the successes achieved in criminal policy during the Weimar period must not be forgotten. In this regard, Koch refers to the admission of women to the legal profession, the legislative regulation of fines, juvenile criminal law, and the reform of the prison system. 

Luts-Sootak and Sedman focus on the Estonian Penal Code of 1929, which came into force in 1935. According to the authors [...]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671636

BOOK REVIEW: Panikos PANAYI, Legal responses to mass migration: from the nineteenth century to World War II, eds. Luigi NUZZO, Michele PIFFERI, Giuseppe SPECIALE and Cristina VANO (Abingdon: Routledge, 2025) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 162-165)

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This long, edited volume containing sixteen essays tries to address the question of legal responses to mass migration from the end of the nineteenth century until the post-Second World War period, an ambitious task. The editors, all Italian legal or legal history scholars, divide the volume into three sections covering 'Discourses', 'Policies and Institutions', and 'Legal Practices’; although the choice of location of the individual pieces is not always clear, especially in the case of those in sections 2 and 3. The chapters come from a 'collaborative research project on Legal History and Mass Migration' (xvi), focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the editors sought to take an interdisciplinary approach, most of the contributions are written by either legal scholars or legal historians. The main focus is Italy and the Italian diaspora, and most of the authors work in Italian universities. 

Section I contains five chapters, beginning with Eliana Augusti's ‘From Vitoria to Kant: A Genealogy of ius migrandi’, an interesting philosophical-legal discussion about the concept of ius migrantis, traced through a series of philosophers down to the present. The author demonstrates command of the evolution of migration policy, and the essay is well conceptualised and clear in its explanation of the various authorities with which it engages, adding an interesting perspective on migration and migration law and rights. Chapter 2, by Giulio Abbate, on 'Emigration and Colonisation: The Debate in Italy at the End of the Nineteenth Century', tackles the issue of legal attitudes towards the relationship between emigration and colonisation, which initially focused upon emigration only taking place as a result of trade but gradually moved towards the idea that it could be linked to conquest because it would bring civilisation. Chapter 3, by Virginia Amorosi, on ‘Leaving Italy: Transoceanic Migration and Legal Discourse in the City of Napoli (1901-1910)’, despite its title and the fact that much of this essay focuses upon Naples, actually covers a wide range of discourse which falls under the broad description of 'legal', focusing not simply on Naples but also more broadly on Italy, including the concern about the loss of people as a result of emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Chapter 4, by Francesco Rotondo, on 'The "Peculiar Paradox" of the Criminalisation of Italian Immigrants in Argentina in the Late Nineteenth Century' examines this process by focusing upon a series of individuals who concentrated up on perceived criminality and sickness against the background of a significant increase in the movement of people into Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century [...]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671635

BOOK REVIEW: Jan MARKERT on Eckart CONZE, Friedlos. Die Deutschen zwischen Kriegsgewalt und Friedenssuche von 1648 bis heute (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2026) (H/Soz/Kult)

 

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First paragraph:

Die Frage nach der Aktualität historischer Publikationen ist nicht immer leicht zu beantworten. Der wissenschaftliche Blick in die Vergangenheit grenzt jede Gegenwartsbezogenheit meist auf strukturabstrakte Kontinuitätsdebatten oder Forschungskontroversen ein. Nur selten gewinnen Bücher und Studien a posteriori durch tagesaktuelle Entwicklungen explizit den Charakter eines Kommentars des Zeitgeschehens. Einer dieser Ausnahmefälle liegt jedoch mit Eckart Conzes umfassender Darstellung der deutschen Kriegs- und Friedensgeschichte vor. Das Nachwort datiert den Abschluss der Manuskriptarbeiten auf den Januar 2026 (S. 510). Nur einen Monat später wurde auch Deutschland durch den Beginn des Irankrieges vor neue sicherheitspolitische Herausforderungen gestellt. Dieser neue globale Konflikt verleiht dem Buch des Marburger Historikers geradezu ungewollt Tagesaktualität, weshalb es nicht nur für ein geschichtsinteressiertes Publikum von Interesse sein dürfte.

Read more here. 

BOOK REVIEW: Chiara VALSECCHI, Family and justice in the archives: historical perspectives on intimacy and the law, by Peter GOSSAGE and Lisa MOORE (ed.) (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2024) (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 146-152)

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Following the editors' introduction the volume gathers sixteen contributions (mostly unpublished), organised into five sections. These explore diverse aspects of the legal fields traditionally defined as family law and inheritance law, while more broadly extending to the realm of emotional and intimate relationships between individuals.  

The editors have identified several thematic clusters around which the essays are grouped: 'Colonial Encounters' (four essays); 'Intergenerational Justice' (three essays); 'Intimacies in the Courtroom' (three essays); 'Marriage Regulation’ (three essays); and 'Everyday Violence' (three essays). The sixteen essays were written by scholars of different backgrounds and academic positions, based in diverse locations. The largest group consists of contributions concerning Canada, but the volume also includes studies on the United States, Australia, India, Latin America, and other regions of the world. Europe, too, is represented, with research on Britain, Russia, and France. Chronologically, the studies span two full centuries - the nineteenth and twentieth - offering a remarkable breadth of perspective both geographically and historically. This richness provides numerous insights for comparative reflection, even though comparison appears less straightforward from a strictly legal or normative standpoint, and proves more fruitful when pursued through broader, interdisciplinary perspectives.  

From a general legal standpoint, it should be noted, for instance, that Fabienne Giuliani's study (Chapter 15), dedicated among other things to an 'extreme' social and legal figure - that of incestuous fathers in nineteenth-century France - represents, together with Juandrea Bates's work on Argentina (Chapter 6) and, to a lesser extent, certain analyses of Francophone Canada, a small minority of studies engaging directly with the codified systems of Civil Law countries. Indeed, while Europe's continental scholarship on family and personal law - often based on archival material such as private papers or judicial records - is already abundant, this very abundance makes the scope for technical legal comparison offered by the volume somewhat limited.

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671631

BOOK REVIEW: James J. SHEEHAN, Shifting sovereignties: a global history of a concept in practice, by Moritz Mihatsch and Michael Mulligan [Berlin and Boston: Walther de Gruyter, 2025]; Sovereignty: European and global histories, 1400-1800, by Cornel Zwierlein and Daniel Lee [Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2025] (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 140-145)

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On June 28, 2004, during a meeting of the NATO alliance in Istanbul, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice slipped the following handwritten note to President George W Bush: 'Iraq is sovereign. Letter was passed from Bremer, 10.26 am Iraq time. Condi.' The president replied by writing in bold letters, 'Let Freedom Reign.' In retrospect, this exchange is one more example of the false hopes and genuine disappointments that attended the United States' misadventure in Iraq. It also shows just how elusive the concept of sovereignty turns out to be. After all, what could sovereignty possibly mean for Iraq in 2004, a state occupied by foreign troops and without a government that could control most of its divided and contested territory?  

For more than a century, scholars have complained about the concept of sovereignty. Some thought it would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. In 1919, for example, Harold Laski wrote that 'when we examine the historic perspective of sovereignty, it becomes sufficiently obvious that its association with the modern state is no more than the expression of a particular environment which is already passing away.' Eight decades later, Hans Lindahl remarked that 'while not yet completely routed, the concept of sovereignty certainly seems on the retreat. Sovereignty, of course, has not passed away. Some observers remain convinced that it should. Jacques Maritain, for example, insisted in 1950 that political philosophy must eliminate sovereignty both as a word and as a concept.' More recently, in a book appropriately entitled Sovereignty RIP, legal scholar Don Herzog provided what might be called a […]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2648456

BOOK REVIEW: Paolo ASTORRI, The legal legacy of the reformation: Catholic and Protestant approaches to law, by John Duddington (ed.) [London and New York: Routledge, 2025] (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 137-139)

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This volume collects essays presented at a conference organised by the editor in 2017 to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. Comprising thirteen chapters, the book is divided into four parts: (I Church Law and the Reformation; (LI) Catholic and Protestant Approaches to Law in the Life of the Church; (III) Catholic and Protestant Approaches to Church and State Law; and (IV) Catholic and Protestant Approaches to Particular Areas of Law. 

The book situates itself in the wake of influential scholarship on law and the Reformation, including works by John Witte Jr (Law and Protestantism, 2002). Harold J Berman (Law and Revolution II, 2003), Mathias Schmoeckel (Das Recht der Reformation, 2014; Das Recht der Reformation in Frankreich, 2024), Martin Heckel (Martin Luthers Reformation und das Recht, 2016), and Robert von Friedeburg (Luther's Legacy, 2016), to mention only a few. As the editor notes in the preface, the core message of the book is that '500 years after it occurred the sundering of Christendom at the Reformation still resonates in the law, but equally the Reformation was not an isolated event. It was the product of forces in society that were present before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door at Wittenberg and to this extent the Reformation did not create change in all cases but instead recognised new forces at work in society and at times accelerated changes which, had the Reformation not occurred, might well have come about anyway' (xiii). 

The volume is not fully homogeneous. Its contributions vary significantly in chronological scope, methodological approach, and confessional focus. Some chapters concentrate primarily on the early modern period, while others extend their analysis into the contemporary era. Some focus exclusively on Catholic ot Protestant contexts, while the majority attempt a comparative perspective. Inevi- tably, chapters that seek to offer broad overviews from the Reformation, or even from the late medieval period, can only provide succinct accounts, often relying more heavily on secondary literature than on primary sources. Nevertheless, the effort to connect early modern legal developments with contemporary legal frameworks is one of the book's notable strengths. As David Mclroy observes. 'the debates within and between the different strands of Christianity which emerged from the Reformation were a key factor in the development of legislation in respect of freedom of religion, civil rights and human rights'. 

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671630

BOOK REVIEW: Rosa CONGOST, From masters of slaves to lords of lands: the transformation of ownership in the western world, by James Q. Whitman [Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 2025] (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 131-136)

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The book I review here is one that cannot fail to impress any reader interested in the historical evolution of property rights. This will be the case whether you are interested in the legal discourse around the concept of property, or in the real and material interests that may lie behind the discourse. In this review, I will emphasise the aspects of the book I find most interesting, while pointing out some questions that came to mind during my reading. I will highlight not only the most obvious findings, but also the possibilities the book offers for starting a dialogue with historians who, like me, are working on similar topics, albeit from different angles and perspectives. 

This dialogue is facilitated by the author's ability to link the multiple references and quotations he provides from classic works, with which we are all familiar, with research from a wide variety of specialised fields. This is evident from the outset. Hence, Blackstone's statement that starts the introduction: ‘[t]here is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind as the right of property, which allows the author to present his book as being about 'legal imagination’; an imagination, he immediately clarifies, that is expressed through the 'idioms of power' (10), a concept taken from Orlando Patterson's book Slavery and Social Death.' James Whitman shares one of the central theses of this book, which is the idea that the modern conception of property has its origins in a slave society. This is an idea that in itself already establishes a dialogue with the modern period, especially in a country such as the United States, which had to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century for the definitive triumph of the 'free-soil doctrines' and the 'disappearance of lawful slavery'. This reference locates us in the contemporary Common Law legal tradition where we are reminded that the success of the 'castle doctrine' and the homestead exemption proves the strong identification of property with land, an idea that is widespread throughout the Western world. To this effect, dialogue between scholars of different legal traditions is guaranteed from the outset because 'the West, as I [the book's author] will speak of it in this book, is the West of the Roman legal tradition' (14). In the last part of this review, I will emphasise the need for this dialogue […] 

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671610

BOOK REVIEW: James Q. WHITMAN, De l’esprit des lois by Montesquieu, edited by Benjamin Hoffmann [Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2024] (Comparative Legal History, XIV (2026), nr. 1 (June), pp. 126-130)

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Charles Louis de Secondat Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu's De l 'Esprit des Lois created a sensation when it was first published in 1748, for reasons that I will touch on in this review; but contemporary readers are likely to balk at reading it from end to end. Montesquieu packed, so it seems, pretty much everything he knew into De l'Esprit des Lois. He knew a lot; and it can be a struggle to plow through it all, for example when it comes to his lengthy, and out of date, disquisitions on German law. I will not suggest that readers - even the learned readers of Comparative Legal History - should feel ashamed if they lose steam while trying. 

That said, Montesquieu was, in a word, a genius. His thoughts, some of them presented in chapters hardly longer than post-it notes, are always engaging and frequently brilliant, even if now and then they seem comical or even sinister. (More on that anon.) He deserves more credit than he always gets, for example for discovering fundamental principles of proportionality and deterrence that we usually attribute to Bentham. Not least, he brought a kind of intellectual daring to his comparative work that was rare in the mid-eighteenth century, and that remains rare today - so much so that the reaction of this reviewer, after reading this excellent new annotated edition from Gallimard, is to wonder, wistfully, whether we are falling short of the standard he set two and a half centuries ago. 

What modern readers undoubtedly know best are Montesquieu's reflections on the functioning of monarchy, democracy and despotism, which occupy the opening books of the Esprit des Lois and still hold a place on the political theory syllabus. There is much more to Montesquieu's masterpiece than that, though, most of which is neglected or dismissed. This is notably true of one of the claims on which he was most insistent, his theory of the formative effect of different climates on the law. 'Climate determinism', as Ralf Michaels drily writes, 'seems eccentric to comparative lawyers today'. So it does, though Michaels makes an audacious case for a creative return to it. I will not defend climate determinism in its original form (and neither does Michaels). But I will defend the scientific, and moral, attitude that led Montesquieu to it. [...]

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DOI: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2049677X.2026.2671608

BOOK REVIEW: Marek Jan WASIŃSKI on Socialism and international law: the cold war and its legacies, edited by Raluca Grosescu and Ned Richardson-Little (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 356-362)

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The prevailing scholarly understanding of geopolitical agency in the formation of international law still seems to echo the logic of Hegelian historiography. A benchmark for this narrative was set in 1824 by Leopold von Ranke, who claimed that the Slavic and Byzantine-Islamic East did not belong to the West. Its peoples, he famously wrote, never exercised any independent influence; they only appear either subservient or antagonistic. With Western Europe proclaimed l’Europe européenne, the line drawn around this central and privileged position came to define the civilised and capitalist West in opposition to its politically, economically, and culturally inferior Other. This entity was presumed incapable of theorising or structurally and normatively shaping the international legal order. European international lawyers from beyond the borders of the Latino-Germanic West often feel compelled to perform rhetorical autos-da-fé as acts of symbolic self-sacrifice and purification, in which their own perspectives are disavowed in order to align with a civilisational script authored elsewhere and promising progress and emancipation. Part of this gesture involves the complete substitution of Europe’s inherited geopolitical divisions with alignments based on epistemic, ethical, and ideo-political affinities. This kind of positioning tends to arise within discursive contexts that assert continuity with a Western tradition, often framing local perspectives as having never departed from its presumed universality. However, this may amount to the epistemic self-erasure of what Hans-Georg Gadamer called one’s own horizon of a historically and spatially situated vantage point, continually reshaped by shifting existential conditions. This seemingly subliminal act of repression manifests in the unsettling and paradoxical practice of writing about international law from a Central and Eastern European perspective offering only the faintest articulation of its contextual standpoint. Marxist-informed critiques of international law might read this not as a neutral scholarly gesture, but as a submission to inherited historical conditions, what Marx described as making history not as they please, but under circumstances already passed down. 

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DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580115

BOOK REVIEW: Leo BOONZAIER on State liability and the law: a historical and comparative analysis by Bartłomiej Wróblewski (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 366-372)

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This book, authored by Bartłomiej Wróblewski, an Assistant Professor at SWPS University, Poznań, is a stimulating contribution to our understanding of the liability of public authorities in Europe. It was first published in Polish in 2011 by CH Beck and has now been translated into highly readable English by Gwidon Naskrent, with revisions by Stephen Dersley. The author tells us, mysteriously, that ‘some changes have been made’ for the English edition. It appeared in spring 2023 as the second title in Routledge’s new Studies in Comparative Legal History series. The author has written two previous books on closely related topics in German and Polish, respectively. The volume under review consolidates the results of this research and makes them available to English readers for the first time. 

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580105

BOOK REVIEW: Ignazio CASTELLUCCI on Law and diversity: European and Latin American Experiences from a legal historical perspective, vol. 1: fundamental questions, edited Peter Collin and Agustín Casagrande (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 373-381)

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The book reviewed here is the first of four volumes derived from two conferences held in 2019 at the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie within the framework of a research project also titled Law and Diversity: European and Latin American Experiences from a Legal Historical Perspective. This volume, edited by Peter Collin and Agustín Casagrande, deals, according to its sub-title, with ‘Fundamental Questions’ of ‘Law and Diversity’ in historic and societal terms: the idea behind it is to assess how the different laws and legal environments researched deal(t) with the notion of ‘diversity’ and associated concepts – eg, those of ‘difference’, ‘discrimination’, ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ – and which societal elements have been the focus of legally relevant ‘diversities’ in the various historic experiences analysed alongside the related express or implied diversified legal disciplines. Three further volumes are expected as part of the project’s research output, dealing in more detail with private, public and criminal law issues associated with the research project’s main theme.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580118

BOOK REVIEW: Assaf LIKHOVSKI on Sovereignty and religious freedom: a Jewish history, by Simon Rabinovitch (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 351-356)

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Simon Rabinovitch’s book is an ambitious, wide-ranging, and erudite discussion of the past and present status of Jewish collective rights. Using a comparative method, Rabinovitch explores a variety of interactions between Jewish communities and modern states in the last two centuries in various countries around the world. The topic of this book is highly relevant to contemporary political debates, not only regarding the place of Jewish communities in modern Western states but also concerning other minority religious groups such as Muslims and Sikhs. While legal historians and other scholars have long been interested in the relationship between ethnic and religious minorities and modern states, Rabinovitch’s book is unique because of the broad and detailed way he explores this topic. On a more abstract level, the author’s analysis is an essay on the nature of liberalism, discussing the dilemma that modern liberal states face when they try to reconcile the individualist nature of liberal ideology with the fact that in every society, there are collective groups, often of a religious nature, whose beliefs and practices sometimes conflict with those of the majority.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580113

BOOK REVIEW: Viktorija MOROZOVAITE on The making and unmaking of ordoliberal language: a digital conceptual history of European competition law, by Anselm Küsters (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 347-351)

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In recent years, with digitalisation and the rise of powerful technology companies, crises related to climate change and inequality, and the European quest for strategic autonomy, the competition law community has faced a revival of debates about the goals of competition law and its analytical tools, methods and institutions. While epithets such as ‘unprecedented times’ may underscore the intensity of emergent challenges, they should be used with caution. Although there is a clear need to test the limits of existing competition law doctrines and explore creative legal solutions, a closer look at the historical development of EU competition law may offer valuable lessons for approaching them.

The origins of EU competition law remain contested. David Gerber, in his seminal work, argued that ‘ordoliberal ideas have penetrated the thought, institutions and practices of the European Community, and this has spread their influence throughout the member states of the Community’, particularly in the field of competition law. Ordoliberalism, also known as the Freiburg School, emphasises the necessity for a rules-based economic order, with a strong state bound by the rule of law capable of curbing private power and safeguarding (individual) economic freedom. However, other scholars have challenged Gerber’s thesis, viewing ordoliberal influence as overstated or misinterpreted.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580112

BOOK REVIEW: Clifford ANDO on The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law, edited by Caroline Humfress, David Ibbetson, Patrick Olive (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 315-317)

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The Cambridge Comparative History of Ancient Law is a wonderful book. Its very great strengths derive from its unusual history of composition, and the book is at its best when, in one way or another, writers actualize the volume's aspirations most sharply. It is never less than exciting and informative, and the patient collaboration among experts in different fields to which it testifies should be a model for future projects of this kind.

The Comparative History aspires to place ʻNear Eastern, Hellenistic, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Chinese and Indian source material in conversation with each other’ (xi). To achieve this, the editors assembled teams in ‘roughly’ five working groups: Near Eastern (including Egypt, sometimes, which was also Greek, sometimes, and Roman, sometimes); Greek (including Hellenistic, sort of); Roman; ʻspecialists in ancient “Chinese” material’; and ʻspecialists in ancient “Indian” sources’ (xii). The categories are not tidy. In practice, the Ancient Near East is sometimes represented by Babylonian material and sometimes by Old Testament Hebrew sources. Rabbinic law is treated nearly exclusively in Chapter 6, ʻLaw and Religion’, which seems not only a kind of caricature but also a neglect of recent efforts to describe the Rabbinic project as that of articulating a ʻcivil law’ for the Jews.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580106

BOOK REVIEW: Laetitia GUERLAIN on La Société de législation comparée. Études sur 150 ans d’histoire, edited by Nicolas Cornu Thénard and Sylvain Soleil (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 343-346

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The Société de législation comparée (SLC), founded in 1869, is the doyen of learned societies devoted to comparative law, and continues to celebrate its anniversaries, as evidenced by the present volume, prepared on the occasion of its 150th anniversary. This work is part of a well-established process of self-celebration: the SLC began by devoting two volumes to its 50th anniversary, published in 1922, while the festivities organised for its 80th anniversary were reported in the Revue internationale de droit comparé in 1949. Finally, a two-volume Livre du centenaire de la Société de législation comparée was published in 1969. 

Was another volume needed to review the history of this now well-known society? Beyond the texts published on the occasion of its anniversaries, the historiography devoted to the history of comparative law in France is now rich. To illustrate this, let us mention three recent publications: Le droit comparé au xxie siècle, a book published in 2015 that includes discussion of the SLC; Yannick Falélavaki's PhD dissertation on legal comparatism, defended in 2016; and a volume of the legal history journal Clio@Themis dedicated to the history of comparative law, published in 2017. To these three examples could be added a substantial number of papers, dealing with more specific aspects of the history of comparative law. While the book does not revolutionise the state of our knowledge, it does make a valuable contribution to the history of comparative law in two respects: not only do the proposed articles interrogate in detail the history of the SLC, they also address the more recent, lesser-known periods.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580111

BOOK REVIEW: Dmitry POLDNIKOV on Die Rechtsnachfolge in Personengesellschaften im Deutschland und im Russland des 19. Jahrhunderts, by Maria Malt, Münster (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 339-343)

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Comparative research in legal history today holds the promise of novelty despite numerous ‘non-comparative’ studies in legal history. Yet it presents a daunting challenge for a scholar, requiring them to enhance our understanding of the past by bridging the distance between domestic present and past law, as well as between domestic and foreign law(s). Maria Malt accepted this challenge in her book Die Rechtsnachfolge in Personengesellschaften im Deutschland und im Russland des 19. Jahrhunderts (Legal Succession in Partnerships in 19th-century Germany and Russia), based on her recently defended PhD thesis at Augsburg University under the supervision of Christoph Becker, who sponsored its publication as the 41st volume in the Augsburg series of studies on legal history. This review aims to present the design of the book and its major claims, followed by its evaluation from the point of view of a Russian legal historian.

The title of the book suggests revisiting the (allegedly) well-researched topic of the dissolution or continuation of a partnership under German law and Russian law in the nineteenth century. The author justifies the relevance of such a study with two major arguments: first, the impossibility of resolving the intricacies in contemporary corporate law without researching its medieval customs or even ancient Roman law; second, the ongoing doctrinal debates and litigation regarding legal consequences of such circumstances under succession and corporate law. The latter is substantiated by a wide array of textbooks, monographs, commentaries on the legislation, academic articles and dictionaries in the German and Russian languages.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580110

BOOK REVIEW: Gigliola DI RENZO VILLATA on «Dans cette diversité des principes d’unité»: intrecci transnazionali nei sistemi di pubblicità immobiliare tra Otto e Novecento, by Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 332-339)

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Throughout her research career, Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina has demonstrated her ability to transition from the Italian to the European sphere and even to a global perspective. Her research on Émer de Vattel, the Swiss international lawyer and author of Droit des gens (1758) and the dissemination of his thought – whether in the original or translated into various languages across Europe and the Western world – has clearly revealed the extent to which Vattel's ideas were utilised and circulated between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the volume under review, a comparative approach is the focus of the author's attention, which is why she has given her work the subtitle Intrecci transnazionali nei sistemi di pubblicità immobiliare tra Otto e Novecento (Transnational Intertwining in Immovable Publicity Systems between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). The scope broadens to encompass the African continent and the outcomes of European colonialism: from the Colony of Eritrea to the Independent State of Congo and the Belgian Congo, and from the German Protectorate of Togo to the international mandate of the League of Nations awarded to France and England. These three case studies serve as exemplary instances in the specific field of investigation, capable of revealing the influences that inevitably arise from one legal system to another and highlighting the weight of traditions developed in land publicity between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during the transition from one territorial reality to another, which, while more distant, was, in a more or less forced manner, closer to the colonising state.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. For further information about the volume on our blog, please visit here

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580109

BOOK REVIEW: Guillaume COT on La Comédie à la lumière du droit. France, Angleterre, Empire (1600–1800), by Gabrielle Vickermann-Ribémont (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 327-332)

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A recurring trait among comparatists may be their tendency – if not their instinct – for erudition. This is particularly true of those engaged in what French comparative literature scholar Florence Schnebelen calls comparatisme au carré (‘squared comparatism’): not only do they compare different geographical and cultural contexts, but also different disciplinary fields – simultaneously. Combining the methodologies of both comparative literature and comparative legal history requires a level of intellectual dexterity that Gabrielle Vickermann-Ribémont clearly demonstrates.

Structured in two parts, containing respectively two and three substantial chapters, this ambitious volume offers a history of theatrical comedy in France, England, and the German-speaking world during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It demonstrates how the history of literature and performance in these regions is deeply intertwined with the development of their respective marriage laws. The author’s central argument is that these three cultural spheres share a common cultural foundation – fuelled by transnational influences and cultural transfers – yet differ significantly in their legal traditions. To highlight this tension between shared cultural references and divergent legal systems, the author offers a detailed examination of matrimonial law across these periods and regions.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. 

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580108