The ESCLH aims to promote comparative legal history and seeks affiliation with individuals and organisations with complementary aims.
This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Explores risk management in medieval and early modern Europe, focusing on 'General Average' Investigates how stakeholders minimised risk in dangerous commercial shipping Illustrates changing concepts of political economy across space and time
(Source: MPI for Legal History and Legal Theory)
We learned that the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory is organizing a summer school on legal history.
Date
3 July - 14 July 2023
Beginning in the twelfth century, taxation increasingly became an essential component of medieval society in most parts of Europe. The state-building process and relations between princes and their subject cities or between citizens and their rulers were deeply shaped by fiscal practices. Although medieval taxation has produced many publications over the past decades there remains no synthesis of this important subject.
This volume provides a comprehensive overview on a European scale and suggests new paths of inquiry. It examines the fiscal systems and practices of medieval Europe, including essential themes such as medieval fiscal theory and the power to tax; royal and urban taxation; and Church taxation. It goes on to survey the entire European continent, as well as including comparative chapters on the non-European medieval world, exploring questions on how taxation developed and functioned; what kinds of problems authorities encountered assessing their fiscal power; and the circulation of fiscal cultures and practices across cities and kingdoms. The book also provides a glossary of the most important types of medieval taxes, giving an essential definition of key terms cited in the chapters.
The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe will appeal to a large audience, from seasoned scholars who need a comprehensive synthesis, to students and younger scholars in search of an overview of this critical subject.
Contents:
Part I – Medieval taxation
Part II – Fiscal systems
Denis Menjot is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2. With Pere Verdés Pijuan he directs the e-Glossary of Medieval Taxation. He has been president of the European Association of Urban History (2006–2008). He is president of the Société Française d’Histoire Urbaine, director of Histoire Urbaine and corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia. His previous publications include "Taxation and Sovereignty in Medieval Castile", in Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 2017.
Mathieu Caesar is Associate Professor in Medieval History at the Université de Genève. He is the author of Le pouvoir en ville. Gestion urbaine et pratiques politiques à Genève (fin XIIIe – début XVIe siècles), Brepols, 2011, and the editor of Factional Struggles. Divided Elites in European Cities and Courts (1400–1750), Brill, 2017, and (with Franco Morenzoni), La Loi du Prince, vol. 1: Les Statuts de Savoie d’Amédée VIII (1430), Turin, 2019.
Florent Garnier is Professor in Legal History at the University of Toulouse 1 Capitole. He is member of Commission scientifique du Comité pour l’Histoire Economique et Financière de la France. His previous publications include "Le fort portant le faible", Déclarez vos revenus! Histoire et imaginaire d’un instrument fiscal (XVIIIe–XXIe siècle), O. Poncet et K. Weidenfeld (Études réunies par), Collection "Études et rencontres de l’École des Chartes", 57, Paris, 2019.
Pere Verdés Pijuan is currently Senior Scientist in the IMF-CSIC in Barcelona, Spain, where he directs the research group on "Taxation and public finances in the Crown of Aragon (13th–15th centuries)". He is director with Denis Menjot of the Glossary of Medieval Taxation and is part of the Steering Committee of the research network on taxation in the Hispanic kingdoms Arca Comunis. Since 2019, he has been director of the Anuario de Estudios Medievales.
For more details see the webpage.
France Culture's daily history broadcast Le Cours de l'histoire (presented by Xavier Mauduit) dedicated four episodes to legal history:
During 2023, the CoCoLaw Project and EuroStorie Centre of Excellence will host the Helsinki Legal History Series. The initiative gathers both established scholars and younger researchers who all work at the intersection of law, society and history. The aim is to promote legal historical research and to illustrate the merits of historical approach in analyzing fundamental questions regarding law's embeddedness in society and the mechanisms of legal change. The seminar series consists of 9 lectures at the University of Helsinki and they are all streamed online, according to the following program:
January 31st
National Styles beyond Boarders. A Travelogue of Migrating Legal Stories in the Nineteenth Century
Cristina Vano (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)
February 28th
European Union and its founding values – a legal history autopsy
Tuuli Talvinko (University of Helsinki)
March 28th
From the university-based ius commune to a potentially universal law. A lecture in honour of Mireille Delmas- Marty (1941-2022)
Alain Wijffels (KU Leuven)
April 25th
Homesteading and the American Dream
K-Sue Park (Georgetown University)
May 30th
The English ‘Law of Succession’ as an expression of European Legal Culture: The Story of its Development
Reinhard Zimmermann (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law)
September 26th
Transnational Legal Transfers: the extraordinary life of JP Benjamin QC (1811-1884)
Catharine MacMillan (Kings College London)
October 31st
The History of Cultural Heritage in International Law
Pauno Soirila (University of Helsinki)
November 28th
Usus Theologicus Pandectarum: The Civilian Tradition in a Theological Context
Wim Decock (UCLouvain)
December 12th
Tombos: How registering the Past became Normative and Why it Faltered in the Nineteenth Century
Tamar Herzog (Harvard University)
CoCoLaw Project
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/comparing-early-modern-colonial-laws
EuroStorie Centre of Excellence
https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/law-identity-and-the-european-narratives)
Abstract
Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law offers the first comprehensive account of the entanglements of Buddhism and constitutional law in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tibet, Bhutan, China, Mongolia, Korea, and Japan. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of experts, the volume offers a complex portrait of “the Buddhist-constitutional complex,” demonstrating the intricate and powerful ways in which Buddhist and constitutional ideas merged, interacted and co-evolved. The authors also highlight the important ways in which Buddhist actors have (re)conceived Western liberal ideals such as constitutionalism, rule of law, and secularism. Available Open Access on Cambridge Core, this trans-disciplinary volume is written to be accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Contents
The Abortion Act 1967 may be the most contested law in UK history, sitting on a fault line between the shifting tectonic plates of a rapidly transforming society. While it has survived repeated calls for its reform, with its text barely altered for over five decades, women's experiences of accessing abortion services under it have evolved considerably. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, this book explores how the Abortion Act was given meaning by a diverse cast of actors including women seeking access to services, doctors and service providers, campaigners, judges, lawyers, and policy makers. By adopting an innovative biographical approach to the law, the book shows that the Abortion Act is a 'living law'. Using this historically grounded socio-legal approach, this enlightening book demonstrates how the Abortion Act both shaped and was shaped by a constantly changing society.
1. Introduction
2. The Early Years
3. The Parliamentary Battle for Restrictive Reform
4. The Battle for Normalisation
5. The Battle for Legal Meaning
6. The Battle for Northern Ireland
7. The Parliamentary Battle for Modernising Reform
8. A Biography of the 'Great Untouchable'
Appendices
Bibliography
Index.
Sally Sheldon is a professor of law at the University of Bristol and University of Technology Sydney, a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an editor of the journal Social & Legal Studies and Cambridge University Press's Law in Context series and a former trustee of the Abortion Support Network and the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. She has published extensively in healthcare law and ethics. She was formerly a professor in Kent Law School, where she worked on the research for this book.
Gayle Davis is Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. She has published widely in the history of medicine and reproductive health, including the recent co-edited volumes, Abortion Across Borders: Transnational Travel and Access to Abortion Services (2019) and The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History (2017).
Jane O'Neill is a social historian at the University of Edinburgh whose research interests include twentieth-century youth, gender, and sexual behaviour. She has published on the history of courtship, contraception and abortion in journals such as History and edited volumes including Students in Twentieth-Century Britain and Ireland.
Clare Parker is an historian who is currently based at the University of Adelaide and has worked at universities in the UK and Australia. She has published on the history of medicine and the politics of abortion and sexuality. She is also a consultant archivist currently working with the State Library of South Australia.
During the 1930s, much of the world was in severe economic and political crisis. This upheaval ushered in new ways of thinking about social and political systems. In some cases, these new ideas transformed states and empires alike. Particularly in Europe, these transformations are well-chronicled in scholarship. In academic writings on India, however, Muslim political and legal thought has gone relatively unnoticed during this eventful decade. This book fills this gap by mapping the evolution of Muslim political and legal thought from roughly 1927 to 1940. By looking at landmark court cases in tandem with the political and legal ideas of Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding fathers, this book highlights the more concealed ways in which Indian Muslims began to acquire a political outlook with distinctly separatist aspirations. What makes this period worthy of a separate study is that the legal antagonism between religious communities in the 1930s foreshadowed political conflicts that arose in the run-up to independence in 1947. The presented cases and thinkers reflect the possibilities and limitations of Muslim political thought in colonial India.
1.:Introduction
2.:In Search of Vulnerabilities Lost
3.:Shahidganj and the Burden of Time
4.:Jinnah: A Thinker of Existential Survival
5.:Iqbal and Combative Constitutionalism
6.:Conclusion
Adeel Hussain is an Assistant Professor of Legal and Political Theory at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and a Senior Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. Before joining Leiden University, Adeel clerked at the Court of Appeals in Frankfurt, worked for an international law firm, and advised the Government of Afghanistan on constitutional and administrative reform. His research focuses on jurisprudence, comparative constitutional law, international law, and the global history of legal and political thought, with an emphasis on South Asia and Europe. This is his first monograph.
On the project:
«iurisprudentia» is a project of the chair for private law with focus on the Swiss Civil Code, University of Zurich, Prof. Dr. Walter Boente. The goal of the project is to make the text corpus «Law» growing since hundreds of years and made up of documents about the law-making process, case law and doctrine of law digitally (more) available and exploitable. The initial focus of the project lays on historic documents of german law, austrian law and swiss law. After successful completion of this pilot phase, however, and in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Jakob Fortunat Stagl other legal systems are planned to be included and international partnerships to be established. Most of the documents targeted by the project are dispersed in archives and libraries and are often only accessible on site, partly under special conditions and almost always with restrictive opening hours. Even if a digital copy of these documents already exists, these are again scattered on different platforms, unfitted for law content, with their own access rules or different technical environment. Full-text searchability of the documents is only rarely possible, and searchability or even transcription of handwritten texts is only available in exceptional cases. Therefore, the project «iurisprudentia» aims to digitalize legal texts and to gather already digitalized texts in one place. The documents will be recognized in full text and if handwritten, automatically transcribed with varying, sometimes surprisingly high levels of accuracy. With «iurisprudentia» the digital copies and the so gathered text corpus will leave the limits of local desks and become freely available «at the click of a mouse», fully searchable, selectable and editable for jurists and historians. At the same time (computational) linguistics gains a new research object since contemporary law texts are often hidden behind paywalls and the historical text corpus «Law» has never been accessible to this extent. For now, only sample editions are available on «iurisprudentia». The content of these editions is still incomplete and is primarily intended to illustrate the concept of the platform and its technical possibilities. At the moment academic supervision is still being sought for a great number of the editions. Beyond that, «iurisprudentia» can be endlessly extended by further editions with only little technical expenditures. We are also very grateful for any suggestions in this matter to iurisprudentia@rwi.uzh.ch . The project has been considerably supported by Prof. Dr. Tobias Hodel, Digital Humanities, Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern, Mag. iur. Bernhard Dengg, Head of the department Law and Economics, Library of the University of Bern, and Dr. Andrea Malits, Head of the department Data Services and Open Access, College library Zurich. An early inspiration for this platform is the platform repertorium.at of Dr. Heino Speer. We are very grateful to all of them. The digital copies were partly prepared by the responsible editors or came from different libraries and archives, as individually indicated in the metadata of the respective documents. Without the digital copies of those platforms and institutions as well as the broad support of their archivists and librarians, projects like this one would not be possible. Thank you! Precondition for the initiation, success and continuation of this project is the software Transkribus, which enabled the content indexation of the documents at this large scale in the first place. As representatives of the whole Transkribus Team our warm thanks go to Günter Mühlberger, Andreas Stauder and Berthold Ulreich. For the graphic design we thank Mr. Berthold Ulreich again as well as Mr. Raphael Schoen and Mr. Dominik Huber from the Department Scientific Visualization and Visual Communication (SIVIC) of the University of Zurich. The programming of this page is built on the Read&Search-Platform of Transkribus . For the adaptation of the front display to the purposes of our project our heartfelt thanks go to Mag. iur. Marwan Ezzat (Lead programmer) as well as to the generous support of the Department for IT-Projects at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich. Our thanks go to its representative for the whole team that has been involved in this project, Mr. Silas Weber, MSc, Head IT-Projects RWF. Feedback, including suggestions for improvement, are highly appreciated and can be directed to the following email address: iurisprudentia@rwi.uzh.ch .
Consult the "labor version" here.
Call for papers
International conference celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Ostend Company (1723-2023)
Location: Ostend, Belgium
Dates: 21-24 November 2023
Organisers: Royal Belgian Marine Society, Flanders Marine Institute, City of Ostend
In 2023, it will be 300 years ago that the General Indian Company, better known as the Ostend Company, was founded. It all started in August 1723, when a considerable financial capital was collected by means of an issue of shares at the Antwerp stock market. Most subscribers belonged to the Austrian Netherlands’ aristocracy, financial and commercial elites in Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Bruges and Ostend. With the collected funds silver bullion was acquired, crews were enlisted, ships were bought and equipped in Ostend. Bruges’s outer port thus became the centre of the eighteenth century Habsburg overseas trade expansion. From Ostend, dozens of ships sailed via Brazil to India (Coromandel and Bengal) and China (Canton). Thanks to a number of niche products, such as tea (more than 50% of the European market), the Ostend Company became a major global competitor in the China trade in the 1720s. Its shareholders were rewarded with a net profit of approximately 150%. The port and the city of Ostend flourished and the whole of the Austrian Netherlands reaped the benefits of this newly established maritime trade. Despite its commercial success, the Austrian Netherlands had to put an end to the Ostend Company’s trading activities due to the mounting pressure of their British, Dutch and French neighbours in 1731.
Even if it only existed for a short period (1723-1731), the importance of the Ostend Company for maritime history cannot be underestimated and reaches far beyond the Belgian context, as it also concerns political, diplomatic, social, commercial, military, intercultural and global aspects of both European and Asian eighteenth-century history. The mixed public-private chartered company can be seen as a Belgium-based multinational corporation avant la lettre, which proved to be an important and innovative global player. But it is also the story of people from different cultures coming together and exchanging views and commodities, highlighting equally the circulation of ideas and practices, and therefore implying knowledge transfers. Although these encounters were generally peaceful, violence did sometimes occur.
The history of the Ostend Company is also one about the economic development of the Austrian Netherlands, the participation of the Habsburg Monarchy in a globalizing world and the opening up of Asian markets to European colonial enterprises. The aim of this international conference is to shed light on a number of as yet unknown aspects, but also to reassess the state of the art from new perspectives or complementary and innovative angles.
We invite scholars to send in abstracts focusing on the Ostend Company, for instance on the following themes:
The juridical aspects of the Ostend Company as a chartered company in a European context (corporate structure, capital base and shareholder involvement, labour relations, trade)
Life of the seafarers on board the East Indiamen
Intercultural relations between the Ostenders and Indians, Chinese, etc.
Military aspects of the Ostend Company at sea and in Asia
The impact of the Ostend Company on the economy of the Austrian Netherlands
The Ostend Company as focus of European politics and diplomacy in the early eighteenth century, including the legal debate on the freedom of the seas and the establishment of comptoirs
Logistic, commercial and financial organisation of the Ostend Company
The role of the Ostend Company in globalisation and imperial history
The Ostend Company compared to other East India Companies, especially with the other smaller companies, e.g. the Danish, Swedish and Prussian companies.
The political perception of the Ostend Company in Europe
Changes in research topics in historiography with regard to the Ostend Company, especially linked to the Belgian nation-state’s colonial ambitions
Other themes on the Ostend Company are equally welcome.
The three day conference will take place at the Flanders Marine Institute in Ostend, Belgium from Wednesday 22 November to Friday 24 November 2023. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the hosts. The conference language is English. Participants will be asked to submit an article for a peer-reviewed publication after the conference.
Participants to the conference are invited to submit an abstract of maximum 400 words with a short CV (5 to 10 lines) to stan.pannier@vliz.be by January 31st, 2023. The applicants will be informed by the conference’s scientific committee by mid-February 2023.
