NEWS: ERC Consolidator Grant (CaPANES Project – Prof. D. De ruysscher)

 

We learned that the European Research Council has recently decided to fund the CaPANES-project (ERC Consolidator Grant) by Professor D. De Ruysscher.

On 17 March 2022, the European Research Council announced its decision to fund the CaPANES-project. This project is an ERC Consolidator Grant of Prof. Dave De ruysscher, who previously, in 2016, obtained an ERC Starting Grant. The ERC Consolidator Grant is funded for the amount of 1.9 million EUR. The CaPANES-project (Causal Pattern Analysis of Economic Sovereignty), which will last five years, will analyze the legal concept of economic sovereignty from a historical perspective. The present-day notion of sovereignty of states does not adequately capture foreign trade relations, networks or economic clout. These shortcomings have resulted from a historical reduction of the meaning of sovereignty since the 1600s. The project will analyze legal concepts of sovereignty that were developed before that time. Cases will be six networked cities of commerce (Bruges, Southampton, Rouen, Lübeck, Toulouse and Florence) in the period of 1400-1620. These cities were interconnected through trade routes, correspondence and diplomacy. Legal concepts depicting the cities’ sovereignty were crafted bottom-up and were often more encompassing than the legal concept of sovereignty of today, also for economic relations. These concepts absorbed changes taking place within cities and in the economic relations between cities. In the CaPANES-project, agent-based and network methods will be used to track down these changes. Developments at the level of individual cities, which will be analyzed with agent-based models, influenced institutional set-ups, constitutional approaches, the organization of trade and policies of access toward foreigners. At the level of networks between cities, dynamics impacting on sovereignty concepts related to foreign relations and these added legal features that were different from those characteristics that resulted from developments within cities. Network analysis will make it possible to detect the dispersal and weight of sovereignty concepts and whether some concepts underpinned a transnational field of sovereignty. Causal patterns underlying change in the concepts mentioned will be the outcome of the research, and following a comparison of historical with present-day situations, these patterns will be used to propose an updated legal concept of economic sovereignty. The project’s team consists of the principal investigator (Dave De ruysscher), one post-doc and five PhD fellows.

NEWS: International Research Network PHEDRA

(Source: PHEDRA)

 

We learned of the establishment of the research network PHEDRA, under the leadership of Professor Luisa Brunori.

Led by Luisa Brunori of the Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire (Lille), the project involves eight teams based in France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Morocco, Spain and the United Kingdom and individual researchers based also in Finland, Belgium and Turkey.

The IRN PHEDRA project aims at developing a concerted approach to European research on the history of business law, from antiquity to the present day, apprehended in its « European ecosystem ». This theme remains little explored by historiography, which nevertheless underlines the extent to which commercial norms and practices constitute a fundamental element in the study of issues related to the historical transformation of our societies.

To meet these objectives, the project – going beyond the traditional national approaches – mobilises several European teams around a collective reflection aiming at identifying the European characteristics of the evolution of business law, through a pooling of knowledge, expertise and sources.

The project relies on solid previous collaborations that highlighted the specific need for collective inter-team scientific work and identified the most appropriate collaborative instruments for this purpose.

The choice of partners follows a logic of strong complementarity: each team is a specialist in the history of business law in its own country, and at the same time each has its own specificities which make them indispensable to the project.

The organization of the network PHEDRA will allow for a collective work on sources and scientific discussions through face-to-face meetings.  The mobility of teams is therefore at the heart of the proposed new methodology. For these reasons, regular working meetings are planned, as well as annual methodological and practical workshops, regular thematic seminars, a thematic school, one-day study sessions, and international conferences.

 

More info on the website of the project

NEWS: ERC Consolidator Grant for Professor Stefania Gialdroni (Roma Tre)

 

(Source: Venetian Cat)

We learned that Professor Stefania Gialdroni received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her project “Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11th-17th Century)”. The full list of ERC Consolidator Grants can be found here: https://erc.europa.eu/news/CoG-recipients-2020. Also see the Twitter hashtag #ERCCoG. Many congratulations to Professor Gialdroni!

 

Professor Gialdroni’s project

Title: Migrating Commercial Law and Language. Rethinking Lex Mercatoria (11^th-17^th Century)

Acronym: MICOLL

Description:

 

MICOLL will analyze the development of commercial law by means of a tool almost ignored in this field: historical linguistics. The borrowing and transfer of legal terms will be carried out through a comprehensive and systematic investigation of medieval and early modern legal sources, in particular commercial letters, contracts and statutes. Even though legal historians tend to deny the effectiveness of a body of customary laws uniformly adopted across medieval and modern Europe, the “myth” of the ancient lex mercatoria continues to provide historical legitimacy to the supporters of corporate self-regulation. According to a widespread historiographical topos, merchants all over the world “spoke the same language” when it came to what was important for them: to make profits. As legal institutions are represented by technical legal words, an analysis of the terms merchants actually used is a powerful and never attempted way to verify the impact of merchants’ migrations on the development of commercial law, which had, in its turn, tremendous effects on social and economic history.

The center of this project will be Venice, for several centuries the mandatory stop for merchandise coming from the East and directed both to northern Europe and to Genoa, from where men and goods would reach other trading centers (e.g., France and the Iberian peninsula). Our time-frame spans from the “commercial revolution” of the 11^th century to the beginning of the modern period, when the new dynamics of transoceanic trade left Venice at the periphery of a world that was changing its very dimensions. 

Profile

Stefania Gialdroni is currently Assistant Professor in Medieval and Modern Legal History at the RomaTre University Law Department, where she teaches Medieval and Modern Legal History and The Legal Protection of Cultural Heritage.

She studied Law at the RomaTre University (JD equivalent) and she obtained a PhD both from the University of Milano-Bicocca and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), within the framework of the Marie Curie, 6th Framework Program of the European Commission (Doctorate in European Legal Cultures). As a PhD student she spent one year at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt a. M., one year at the London School of Economics and two years at the EHESS in Paris. She was post-doc research fellow at Arcadia University (The College of Global Studies, Rome Center), the University of Roma Tre, the University of Palermo and the University of Helsinki. She is the author of several articles on the history of commercial law and on “Law and the Humanities”. In 2011 she published the monograph “East India Company. Una storia giuridica (1600-1708)” (Bologna: Il Mulino) and in 2019 she co-edited the book “Migrating Words, Migrating Merchants, Migrating Law. Trading Routes and the Development of Commercial Law” (Leiden/Boston: Brill).

 

stefania.gialdroni@uniroma3.it

NEWS: Appointment Professor Marietta Auer as new director Max Planck Institute for European Legal History

(Source: MPI for European Legal History)

We learned that Professor Marietta Auer has been appointed as the new director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. Here the press release from the MPI:

The Institute is pleased to announce that Marietta Auer has accepted the Max Planck Society's offer to become a scientific member and director of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. Marietta Auer's appointment means that a further full-fledged department with a focus on legal theory will be established at the Institute, complementing the two existing departments dedicated to ‘European and comparative legal history’ (Department I, S. Vogenauer) and ‘Historical Regimes of Normativity’ (Department II, T. Duve). Marietta Auer is expected to take up her work in Frankfurt September, 1^st, 2020.

Marietta Auer (1972) completed both legal examinations at the University of Munich. There she also earned her doctorate in law and was later habilitated — both under the supervision of Claus Wilhelm Canaris. Prof. Auer also had two longer stays at Harvard Law School, where she received her LLM in 2000 and her SJD in 2012. In addition to her legal studies, she has an MA in philosophy and sociology (Munich). After her habilitation in 2012, she received a professorship at the University of Giessen. There she has held the chair for private law and philosophy of law since 2013 and has served as dean since 2016. Her research focuses on private law and legal theory.

The directors, researchers and staff are all pleased about this strengthening of fundamental legal research within the Max Planck Society and the intellectual and institutional growth connected with Marietta Auer's appointment!

Thomas Duve, Stefan Vogenauer

NEWSLETTER: MPI for European Legal History

(image source: Max Planck Society)

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main) sent out the latest edition of its newsletter.

More information can be found here.