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. 

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.2025.2580115

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

BOOK REVIEW: Emily KADENS on La dynamique juridique des réseaux marchands: Hanses, nations, agences, filiales et comptoirs, edited by Luisa Brunori (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 318-323)

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This collection of essays, as Luisa Brunori’s introduction explains, explores the legal landscape of merchant institutions from the medieval to the modern periods. The book, which is the third component of the PHEDRA project (‘Pour une Histoire Européenne du DRoit des Affaires’), originates from a colloquium held in Lille (France) in November 2021. A central thesis of the project is that commercial law is inherently supra-national and supra-legal. Commercial law, the volume argues, cannot be understood through analysing national systems alone, nor by merely comparing those systems. Instead, one must look to transnational merchant networks, such as Hanses, nations, trading posts, and factors, to study how business norms influenced and were influenced by formal commercial law.

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.2025.2580114

BOOK REVIEW: Emanuel VAN DONGEN on Codifications of Late Antiquity: exclusive and universal, by JHA Lokin, edited by Tom Von Bochove, Frits Brandsma, Anne-Marie Drummond and Pia Lokin-Sassen (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 318-323)

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This work represents the final project of the late Jan Lokin, professor of Roman law and its history at the University of Groningen, which he had nearly completed just before his passing. Lokin was a well-known Dutch law professor who taught Roman law and legal history to around 25,000 students through his lifetime, and a legal historian with broad interests and knowledge. He wrote numerous works on Greek-Roman or Byzantine law, Justinian as a codifier, legal education in the sixth century, and the phenomenon of codification (nb, a bibliography of Lokin can be found at the end of the book that motivates this review). Throughout his long career, Lokin frequently wrote about the codification of law. Fittingly, the present book on codifications in Late Antiquity has been published in a period in which there seems to be a renewed interest in codifications.

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.2025.2580107

BOOK REVIEW: Donal K. COFFEY on Brexit, union, and disunion: the evolution of British constitutional unsettlement by Sionaidh Douglas-Scott (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 362-366)

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Brexit blew up the United Kingdom’s constitutional settlement. When the UK voted to leave the European Union, it threw into sharp relief a series of delicate constitutional arrangements that governed the relationship of the Government to Parliament through prorogation, the integration of direct democracy into a system ostensibly founded on representative democracy, the balance of power between Westminster and the devolved regions, the rights that citizens held in the UK – and that is merely to scratch the surface. In the current volume, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott takes the crisis offered by Brexit to provide an overview of the British constitutional settlement across a number of different axes. The monograph as a whole is an entertaining scholarly tour de force which demonstrates the application of a wide range of methodologies in a sophisticated fashion.

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.2025.2580105

BOOK REVIEW: Sara L. KIMBLE on International law and women’s history: historical methods for egalitarian scholarship: A Review of Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces?, edited by Immi Tallgren (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2 (December), pp. 306-314)

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Nearly a century ago, Virginia Woolf asked ‘If Shakespeare Had a Sister’ in A Room of One’s Own Woolf imagined Shakespeare’s sister who was equally gifted, ‘as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was’ but denied access to school, books, and the opportunities for intellectual work. Talent with no room to develop would spell only grief for Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, Woolf concluded. The cause of ‘Judith Shakespeare’s’ tragedy, however, was not on her shoulders alone but rather on the patriarchal society that limited all women’s access to education, shackled them to unending domestic and reproductive duties, and prevented their civic, financial, and personal independence.

Historians and legal scholars are still writing about the ways in which women struggled against societal, legal, religious, scientific, and educational limits to seek lives of meaning and satisfaction according to their own potential. In Portraits of Women in International Law, edited by Immi Tallgren, we have legal history’s corollary: what of Hugo Grotius’s wife, Maria van Reigersberch? Her current place in history is that of a wife loyal in service to her husband. But in Tallgren’s volume we meet an intrepid, intelligent woman who was resourceful and knowledgeable about finances, spoke boldly to court officials, sought contracts with printers, and travelled independently. Readers are encouraged to ask: did Grotius’s wife also make contributions to legal thought beyond saving the life of her husband, the man whose writings laid the foundations for international law as recognised today?

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: William BARBEY on Elgar encyclopedia of comparative law edited by Jan M. Smits, Jaakko Husa, Catherine Valcke and Madalena Narciso (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2)

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Reviewing a collective work, an encyclopaedia no less, is not an easy task. How do you start your reading? Is one supposed to read it from cover to cover, from the first to the last entry in the order of print? Or is one to focus on the most important entries (and in that case how does one select them)? Put in another way: how can a single reviewer do justice to the work of more than 200 eminent scholars?

I once read that in order to criticise a book, you do not have to read all of it: like the cooking of a steak, one bite is all it takes to tell if the chef was off his game. Nonetheless if the dish is properly made, and if you enjoy even your greens, you will probably be more than tempted to order a pudding.

Not entirely sure of the merit of such a method, I narrowed down a few entries (as if selecting from a menu) according to my own fields of interests (eg ‘comparative jurisprudence’, ‘legal families’, ‘legal history and comparative law’, ‘codification’, ‘estoppel’, ‘trust law’, ‘subjective right(s)’) and out of curiosity (eg ‘Islamic law’, ‘gift’, ‘Iceland’). And so, I dived right into it – just to see if it would satisfy my appetite.

After a while, the many cross-references guided me towards more and more new entries I had at first neglected. And being in the habit to look up words in a (printed) dictionary only to forget the one word I was looking for in the first place (having encountered numerous more interesting definitions in the meantime), I ended being quite astray from my original path, transported to other times and other places: ‘Constitutional Court (Germany)’, ‘lex mercatoria’, ‘Europe small jurisdictions (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco)’, ‘supervening events and force majeure’.

For a scholar, to be lost in the material is not a curse but a gift. It is the very essence of comparative research: discovering and revealing connections between per se unrelated themes or jurisdictions. One has to be curious and willing to confront oneself to unknown territories (‘it is simply impossible to master all methods that are needed in order to explore all the law at all times and places’, writes Agustín Parise, vol 1, 359). Above all it demands to go beyond one’s comfort zone.

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.2025.2580119

BOOK REVIEW: Simon STERN on The reasonable person: a legal biography by Valentin Jeutner (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 180-186)

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Valentin Jeutner sets out to understand the reasonable person’s ‘double life’ as an ‘unpretentious but powerful legal standard and as the common law’s most legendary but also most controversial character’–one that ‘features in virtually all areas of law’, populating areas such as contracts, torts, criminal law and administrative law. Jeutner explains at the outset that the standard’s most important feature is that it demands attention to ‘the perspective of another’: whatever particular traits it embodies, ‘the reasonable person figure is not you’. After a short introduction that previews the argument and collects some of the faux-jocular character sketches that judges and lawyers have composed over time, the book begins a historical review of some of the figure’s precursors and then considers its spread and various instantiations.

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.2025.2500222

BOOK REVIEW: Joanna N. ERDMAN on Roe: the history of a national obsession by Mary Ziegler (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 173-179)

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Mary Ziegler wrote Roe: The History of a National Obsession at the start of 2022. By the year’s end, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

Yet for Ziegler, Roe was not – and has never been – simply a judicial decision that could be overturned. Roe ‘is a symbol of everything that divides us’ (xii). The us are activists, lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, judges and ordinary Americans who, for the last half-century, have used Roe as a symbol to express and to hold cultural differences and political disagreements, ambiguities, and even contradictions, over basic national values (xi). There is no overturning Roe because Roe has been turning and turning in a national obsession over the United States of America itself.

The chapters name these national values: democracy, liberty, and equality, with liberties of choice and religion, and equalities of gender, class and race, as questions of law, science, and justice. The chapters are written chronologically, punctuated by US Supreme Court judgments, when decade by decade, ideas about Roe were tested and challenged, accepted, dismissed, or simply never acknowledged. Yet again Ziegler does not let the court write this history. Narrative, not authority, structures the book. Roe is carried through time as a symbol of choice and coercion, judicial activism and restraint, scientific truth and perversion, social justice and neglect, religious liberty and strife. ‘When we talk about Roe, we contradict ourselves and one another’ (158). These contradictions only show the complexity of ideas about abortion, ideas which sometimes switched sides in political debates, debates that rarely reduced to two sides. Ziegler captures this ‘robust popular constitutional practice’ (158) in Roe as a cultural object of obsessive attachment and struggle, promise and provocation. Of course, as Roe travelled through time, Roe also travelled around the world and carried the contradictions of its meaning into comparative constitutional abortion law and politics, making this national history recognisable and relatable transnationally.

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.2025.2500221

BOOK REVIEW: Rotem GILADI on Nazi antisemitism and Jewish legal self-defense: the turn to law in liberal democracies, 1932–39 by David Fraser (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 169-173)

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Jewish turns to law – whether as a profession, a means of social mobility and integration, or a venue where emancipatory claims could be formulated or put forward to negotiate the challenges of modernity – remain largely unexplored in legal-historical research. There is no denying the rich insights displayed by biographies, prosopographies, institutional histories, and works focusing on particular case studies written over the past three decades or so; yet browsing through the catalogues of Jewish personal or institutional archives recording the past two centuries reveals that this richness serves to obfuscate many more lives (in particular of those who have not reached the status of luminaries), associations, foci of advocacy, legal strategies, court cases, or lawmaking enterprises. At the same time, studies of Jewish legal responses to the rise of National Socialism have recently inclined towards international law, international institutions, and international advocacy action. While certain episodes of Jewish legal activism at the national level are well-documented, many others remain under-researched (9).

David Fraser’s meticulously researched comparative legal history represents an important contribution to these lacunas in the extant literature. It narrates not only a range of what may be described as Jewish ‘legal self-defence’ across various jurisdictions but also how Jewish individuals and institutions communicated across national borders to share information, knowledge and advice when responding to the rise of the antisemitism of the 1930s. Throughout the book, action and reaction are juxtaposed to frame Jewish legal advocacy as a local, but also inter- and trans-national, response to a local and inter- and trans-national threat. To that end, Fraser first carefully recreates the thick socio-political contexts, discourses, and imaginations of Catholic police officers, conservative nationalists, journalists, army veterans, fringe and mainstream politicians, and professionals of the ‘Antisemitic international’ (11) to foreground a ‘socio-legal comparative history of … Jewish attempts in the 1930s “Anglosphere” to counter the rise in fascist and Nazi antisemitism’ (1). To that end, the first two chapters (2–3) provide a convenient, compact comparative survey of some of the features of the ‘Antisemitic international’: its tropes, texts – in particular, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion – German ties, circulation, agents, the networks they formed, and their modus operandi. These chapters also reflect on the challenges, choices, and pitfalls of Jewish legal resistance in jurisdictions outside the Anglosphere.

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.2025.2500220

BOOK REVIEW: Mateusz BIECZYŃSKI on Artistic canons and legal protection: developing policies to preserve, administer and trade artworks in 19th-century Rome and Athens by Chiara Mannoni (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 164-169)

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Chiara Mannoni’s Artistic Canons and Legal Protection: Developing Policies to Preserve, Administer and Trade Artworks in 19th-Century Rome and Athens offers an exploration of the interplay between law, culture, and art during a transformative historical period. Focusing on two pivotal European cities, Rome and Athens, Mannoni argues that nineteenth-century legal frameworks were not merely reactive to the burgeoning art market but actively shaped the artistic canonsFootnote1 they aimed to safeguard. Her analysis bridges legal and art history, providing a fresh perspective on how laws influenced both the preservation of national heritage and the circulation of art within an evolving international market.

The book consists of an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter presents a different aspect of the trade in antiquities and the legal restrictions imposed upon it, following a chronological order. The first chapter focuses on protective legislation, with particular emphasis on the significance of the Chirografo Chiaramonti (1802), an Act that introduced early preventive measures to regulate the export of antiquities and established the groundwork for cultural heritage protection in the Papal States, and the Edict Pacca (1834), which expanded these protections by introducing stricter controls on the removal and sale of cultural artifacts, emphasising the public interest in preserving Rome’s historical legacy. Both were designed to safeguard the cultural heritage of Rome. Similarly, the Gesetz of 1834 for Greece marked an important milestone in codifying legal protections for antiquities, aiming to prevent the widespread looting and unauthorised export of Greece’s rich archaeological heritage. Chapter two examines administrative chronicles, detailing the practical application of these legal measures within the Papal States, Athens, and the Greek provinces. Finally, in the third chapter, the author moves on to analyse the practices surrounding the trade of ancient artworks in both territorial contexts, discussing their influence on the shaping of the European art market and aesthetic preferences.

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.2025.2500219

BOOK REVIEW: Lyndsay CAMPBELL on English law, the legal profession, and colonialism: histories, parallels, and influences edited by Cerian Griffiths and Łukasz Jan Korporowicz (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1, June, pp. 150-153)

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Originating in and building on a 2021 conference, this collection contributes to the growing literature on the histories of empire, focusing on the movement of English law and the history of the legal profession in the colonial context. It features chapters from scholars around the world at a whole range of career stages. The conclusion, by Cerian Griffiths and Łukasz Jan Korporowicz, indicates that the project is an attempt to tug British Empire history into the theoretical orbit of European-style Global Legal History, to shed light on a field that ‘has traditionally been the poor relation to its civil law cousin’ (258) and to present research on the ‘early modern and modern eras which often receive less interest than medieval historical studies’ (259). I had to chew on these statements for a bit, and also the omission, in the same paragraph, of the forty-six-year-old Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History from the editors’ list of academic associations that have contributed to the development of the history of the common law world over the past 40 years (Canada is mostly absent from the book, which perhaps explains this omission). In any case, although at least in theory Global Legal History seems to purport to do everything, a single collection cannot. More importantly, I take it that the editors’ point is to underline the focus on the mobility of law and people, to look beyond the nation and the local in our questions and approaches.

English Law, the Legal Profession, and Colonialism opens with a helpful introduction by Michael Lobban, who describes the book's major thematic preoccupations, including how legal ideas travelled within the British Empire (between the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ and also among colonies), the tension between authoritarianism and liberalism, and how that tension wove through conceptions of the nature and purpose of the rule of law, given that the law and legal principles that travelled around the empire landed in places that were unlike England, to varying degrees and in various ways. The chapters that follow, although somewhat uneven in readability, direct our attention not only to public law and notable juridical personalities but also to the network of personal and commercial relationships – structured through legal rights and principles – that were so crucial to the decisions individual people made in shaping legality in the British Empire.

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.2025.2500210