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The 100th anniversary of the Weimar Constitution’s promulgation has brought a number of new stimuli to a historiography that has for a long time focused largely on the Weimar Republic’s failure. Two prominent recent publications – Udo Di Fabio’s study and a collective volume edited by Horst Dreier und Christian Waldhoff – are reviewed in this issue by the Brazilian constitutional historian Marcelo Neves. His review and the last months’ public debate on the merits and flaws of the Weimar Constitution in Germany, which was framed by current concerns about the state of Western democracies, show to what extent constitutional history is always also a conversation about the present. ...
Introduction: Convivencia(s)
(2018)
How can members of different cultures, religions, and confessions live together peacefully? What rules of coexistence, interaction, and conflict regulation have these communities developed to enable this cohabitation? What role does law play in this? – This is not the first time such questions have been discussed. These questions gain a specific poignancy when it’s not just about taste or cultural preferences but rather concerns an existential dimension like the religious sphere: for instance, when the immanent is observed from the perspective of transcendence. Even the smallest event can lead to major conflicts. ...
The end of an empire is almost always marked with legal acts, which often serve as the founding documents of a new order. There the beginning and the end converge. For example, the constitutional documents of Hispanic America after 1810 simultaneously heralded the dawn of new states and the twilight of the Spanish Empire. Since constitutions and the state institutions they help to build are deeply imbued with symbolic power, they are an important element in constructing, perhaps even in "inventing", nations. They provide raw materials for our regimes of memory and divide history into a "before" and an "after", through which they also exert a stabilising effect. ...
According to international and national constitutional law, indigenous peoples in most Latin American countries have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions. As a consequence of this and of a long and ongoing process of political debate and recognition, ever more indigenous peoples are practicing their own laws, following their own cultural traditions and customs. In doing so, they often draw on history, recreating their identities and reconstructing their distinct legal pasts. At the same time, historical research has increasingly pointed out the intense interaction between indigenous peoples and European invaders during colonial period. It has become clear that it is difficult to draw a clear line between purely ‘indigenous’ and ‘colonial’ legal traditions due to the hybridisation of indigenous and colonial laws and legal practices. The aim of this paper is to introduce this historiography and its relevance to law and to present some methodological challenges in writing the history of indigenous rights in Latin America resulting from this shift in (legal) historiography.
Debattieren wir in der Rechtsgeschichte zu wenig über Grundsätzliches und über Methodenfragen – oder lässt sich im Gegenteil eine gewisse Ermüdung feststellen, weil die Vielzahl übergreifender Diskussionen nur von der Quellenlektüre und der inhaltlichen Arbeit ablenkt? Die Antwort fällt schwer. Im Anschluss an einige Gespräche auf dem Rechtshistorikertag in Tübingen haben wir uns entschlossen, in Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History den Raum für genau diese Erörterung zur Verfügung zu stellen. Um die Debatte anzustoßen, haben wir den einleitenden Beitrag über Normengeschichte, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Praxisgeschichte an knapp 30 Kolleginnen und Kollegen versandt und sie eingeladen, ihre Sicht der Dinge knapp und zugespitzt darzulegen. ...
Die Welt des Rechts lässt sich heute nicht mehr so leicht in nationale oder internationale Sphären ordnen. Wo Lawmaker als private Akteure in einer globalisierten Ökonomie die Normen häufig nachhaltiger bestimmen als staatliches Recht, da ändern sich auch die Anforderungen an die Rechtswissenschaft.
Editorial
(2014)
In this article, I review select institutional and analytical traditions of Legal History in 20th century Germany, in order to put forth some recommendations for the future development of our discipline. A careful examination of the evolution of Legal History in Germany in the last twenty-five years, in particular, reveals radical transformations in the research framework: Within the study of law, there has been a shift in the internal reference points for Legal History. While the discipline is opening up to new understandings of law and to its neighboring disciplines, its institutional position at the law departments has become precarious. Research funding is being allocated in new ways and the German academic system is witnessing ever more internal differentiation. Internationally, German contributions and analytic traditions are receiving less attention and are being marginalized as new regions enter into a global dialogue on law and its history. The German tradition of research in Legal History had for long been setting benchmarks internationally; now it has to reflect upon and react to new global knowledge systems that have emerged in light of the digital revolution and the transnationalization of legal and academic systems. If legal historians in Germany accept the challenge these changing conditions pose, thrilling new intellectual and also institutional opportunities emerge. Especially the transnationalization of law and the need for a transnational legal scholarship offers fascinating perspectives for Legal History.
For centuries, it may have seemed as if standards of normative thinking now valid across the globe had first been instituted in Europe. These normative orders form the foundations of our verdicts that define and distinguish right and wrong, good and bad or even beautiful and ugly. But in order to better understand the global presence of such normative orders that evolved from within the European horizon, the history and implications of European expansion in the early modern era cannot be swept under the rug. ...
Thirty years ago, in 1983, Harold Berman’s Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition was first published. His work had an enormous impact on legal scholarship all over the world. Many aspects of his central thesis – that there was something akin to a "papal revolution" in eleventh century Europe; that this "revolution" set a pattern for future epochs of transformation; that the special relation between Religion and Law was a distinct feature of the "Western Legal Tradition" – were largely discussed by legal historians, historians and social scientists. Others, like his "Social Theory of Law", received less attention. Although there had been strong criticism by scholars, especially medievalists, on some aspects of Berman’s work, it has become a standard reference in scholarly writings, not least outside of Europe. Since its appearance in 1983, Law and Revolution has been translated into German, French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Lithuanian. Twenty years later, in 2003, with his project entitled Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition, Berman presented the second volume of what was thought to be a trilogy. Twenty years had gone by, the political world order had changed, but Berman’s main point, the importance of analyzing the role of Religion and Law, and the specific constellation of these two modes of normative thought, had gained new currency. In 2007, Harold J. Berman passed away, but not without having opened his historical and legal thought to the challenges of a globalized world. ...
Editorial
(2010)
Wohl jeder Jurist kennt Kants Satz, dass die einfache Frage "Was ist Recht?" den "Rechtsgelehrten […] in Verlegenheit" setze. Höchstens "[w]as Rechtens sei (quid sit iuris), d. i. was die Gesetze an einem gewissen Ort und zu einer gewissen Zeit sagen oder gesagt haben", schloss Kant an, könne dieser "noch wohl angeben". Selbst das ist, wie wir inzwischen wissen, mindestens sehr optimistisch formuliert: Denn "Rechtens" war eben nicht nur, "was die Gesetze" sagten. Und obwohl vor allem deutsche Gelehrte seit Jahrzehnten beträchtliche intellektuelle Energie auf die Erforschung "des Rechtsbegriffs" verschiedener historischer Situationen verwenden, erscheinen die Grundbegriffe von "Recht" einem geschulten Beobachter immer noch "viel weniger historisch durchgearbeitet als 'Staat'". ...
Für den Rechtshistoriker sind Konzilien vor allem Versammlungen, auf denen Konzilskanones – und damit eine der wichtigsten Quellen des kirchlichen Rechts – produziert werden. Besonders für die Verfassungsgeschichte des Spätmittelalters ist freilich schon lange die weit über diese Funktion hinausgehende Bedeutung der Kirchenversammlungen als Orte der symbolischen Repräsentation und der Kommunikation unterstrichen worden. Der folgende Beitrag knüpft an diese Überlegungen zu den Funktionen der Kirchenversammlungen an, widmet sich dabei allerdings einem Verfahren, das vor dem Dritten Provinzialkonzil von Lima 1582/1583 durchgeführt wurde – also einer von der kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte generell nur wenig bearbeiteten Epoche und einer aufgrund der Missionssituation zahlreiche Besonderheiten aufweisenden Region. Gerade wegen der Missionssituation und der besonders engen Verbundenheit von Recht und Religion in der Neuen Welt verweist das Verfahren, in dem sich eine große Zahl Mestizen um die Zulassung zur Priesterweihe bemühte, darüber hinaus auf typische Praktiken der Kommunikation über Recht in der spanischen Monarchie des 16. Jahrhunderts. Einiges spricht dafür, dass sich an ihm nicht nur ein bislang praktisch unbekannter Teil der Aktivität der Konzilsväter rekonstruieren lässt, sondern zugleich Grundzüge einer sich zur Verfassung verdichtenden, Kirchliches und Weltliches unauflösbar integrierenden politischen Ordnung in einer wichtigen Region der polyzentrischen spanischen Monarchie im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert beobachtet werden können. ...
Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht in Lateinamerika im Licht des bicentenario : Einleitung zur Debatte
(2010)
Mit einem knappen Aufruf hatten wir zur Debatte "Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht in Lateinamerika im Licht des bicentenario" eingeladen. Uns schien, dass die anstehenden 200-Jahrfeiern zur Unabhängigkeitsbewegung in Lateinamerika dazu genutzt werden müssten, Fragen an die Rechtsgeschichte zu stellen und rechtshistorische Erfahrung in die Diskurse um Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht in Lateinamerika einzubringen. ...