Artists and the Law in Baroque Rome at UAM

[With help from an automatic translator, we have the following announcement.  DRE]

The next session of the Coloquios Historia Derecho at the Universidad Autnóma de Madrid will take place on Wednesday, March 6, at 3:00 p.m., in Seminar VIII of the Faculty of Law.

Professor Antonia Fiori (Università degli studi di Roma – La Sapienza), will speak about her research on artists' contracts in Baroque Rome, with the presentation titled “ Rome wasn't built in a day: Artists and the Law in Renaissance and Baroque Rome.”  More information on the Ccolloquim is here.

To connect via Zoom: Meeting ID: 829 1079 8716 / Passcode: 609743

The next session, taught by Professor María Teresa Calderón, will now be held on March 22.

Transformation of Consumer Law and Policy in Europe

The Transformation of Consumer Law and Policy in Europe, ed. Hans-W Micklitz and , Christian Twigg-Flesner (Hart/Bloomsbury) has been published:

This book analyses the transformation of consumer law and policy in Europe from 4 perspectives: first, the temporal transformation, i.e., changes that can be tracked from the turn of the millennium; secondly, the substantive dimension, i.e., changes in the scope of the rights and remedies provided by consumer law, as well as the underpinning values; thirdly, the institutional dimension, i.e., changes in the role of national courts, national Parliaments, consumer agencies, and consumer organisations; and fourth, the procedural element, i.e., the shift from individual enforcement via courts to enforcement by public regulators, consumer associations, alternative dispute resolution, and the development of collective enforcement exercised by consumer agencies and/or consumer organisations.

With contributions by leading consumer law scholars from across Europe, this book is a fascinating account of how consumer law has often been shaped by national as much as European interests.

--Dan Ernst.  TOC after the jump 

Job Alert: Austrian Legal and Constitutional History

We’ve recently noted the posting of an advertisement for a Tenure-Track Professor in the Field of Austrian Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna.  In part it reads:

The successful applicant is expected to have outstanding achievements in research and teaching in the field of Austrian legal and constitutional history in its European and international contexts. Particular emphasis is placed on the main areas of the subject according to the curriculum of the Diploma Programme in Law (“Modern Legal and Constitutional History”: Constitutional and Private Law History; part of the module “European and International Foundations”) and the Bachelor and Master Programme in International Law (module “European and Global History”), and at least one focus in teaching and research is expected, which secures and ideally also expands the traditional spectrum of the Faculty. Applicants are expected to be familiar with the sources of Austrian legal and constitutional history and to have experience in relevant archival research. In the interest of continuing existing international cooperation, the embedding of the applicants' research in the Central and Eastern European context of Austrian legal and constitutional history is desired. In order to maintain an attractive and diverse range of courses, breadth of expertise and ability and willingness to hold courses in foreign languages are expected. Starting date: 1.10.2024

Your academic profile: Doctoral degree/PhD; two years of international research experience during or after doctoral studies; outstanding research achievements, excellent publication and funding record, international reputation; experience in designing of and participating in research projects, ability to lead research groups and acquire third-party funding; enthusiasm for excellent teaching and supervision at the bachelor's, master's, and doctoral level.

--Dan Ernst

Fijalkowski, "Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial "

Routledge has published Law, Visual Culture, and the Show Trial (2023) by Agata Fijalkowski (Leeds Beckett University, UK). A description from the press:

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.

The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.

This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.

More information is available here. An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity

[We have an announcement of the interdisciplinary workshop, “Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modernity,” to be held at St John's College, Oxford UK, in April 2024.  We understand that the organizers are “particularly keen to receive some abstracts from early career researchers and scholars working in law as well as in history, and on contexts outside of England.”  DRE]

In a study published just over forty years ago, Richard Kagan outlined a Western-European ‘legal revolution’ taking place between 1500 and 1700. Characterised by growing recourse to formalised courts for civil dispute-resolution, and judicial centralisation around monarchs and rulers, this trend has been identified in various cultures and contexts since: in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Scandinavia, and in ‘New World’ colonies. Counts of surviving casefiles, plea roll entries, and register folios among legal archives confirms the general course of this trend. Yet simply enumerating lawsuits across a range of jurisdictions cannot, by itself, explain this social and institutional phenomenon.  
Litigation required knowledge about how to find legal counsel, how to write a petition or submit information, and where and when a court was held – and so its rise was driven by some practical, popular knowledge of the law. This phrase encapsulates several semantic challenges, however. What or who is included in the category of ‘popular’, and how do we measure popularity – by number or by status? What constitutes ‘knowledge’ of the law and its processes? How was it gained, who had access to it, and how did they use it? What aspects of the law were open knowledge? There is a tendency to focus on the doctrines and precepts of written law. Yet how widely were the procedures, routines, customs, and documents of courts and their personnel understood?

This one-day, hybrid conference will bring together researchers working on different legal and judicial contexts across early modernity to share the kind of occasional, practical insights which – until we compare and contrast our findings – might feel incidental to individual research agendas. Contributions to this discussion are invited particularly from postgraduate and early-career scholars working with legal archives, and from researchers in history, law, and related disciplines.

Short papers (no longer than 15 minutes) are welcomed on three broad themes:

• The transmission, reception, and collection of knowledge about how to access the law among wider populaces – through literature, performance, and other cultural modes;
  

• The use of judicial and extra-judicial systems – evidence for how people practically approached the law, made complaints, hired counsel, accessed courts, whether as litigants, informants, witnesses, or jurors etc.;

• The application and adaptation of legal ideas within and outside of courtrooms – the exploitation of perceived loopholes in the law; the deployment of formalities like documents and witnesses to extra-judicial events; communal adaptations of law.

Please send short abstracts (150 words) and a brief biography to Laura Flannigan (laura.flannigan@sjc.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.

Robilant's "Making of Modern Property"

Anna di Robilant, Boston University, has published The Making of Modern Property: Reinventing Roman Law in Europe and its Peripheries 1789–1950 (Cambridge University Press):

In this original intellectual history, Anna di Robilant traces the history of one of the most influential legal, political, and intellectual projects of modernity: the appropriation of Roman property law by liberal nineteenth-century jurists to fit the purposes of modern Europe. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources, many of which have never been translated into English, di Robilant outlines how a broad network of European jurists reinvented the classical Roman concept of property to support the process of modernisation. By placing this intellectual project within its historical context, she shows how changing class relations, economic policies and developing ideologies converged to produce the basis of modern property law. Bringing these developments to the twentieth century, this book demonstrates how this largely fabricated version of Roman property law shaped and continues to shape debates concerning economic growth, sustainability, and democratic participation.

--Dan Ernst

Wheatley's "Life and Death of States"

Natasha Wheatley, Princeton University, has published The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty (Princeton University Press):

Sprawled across the heartlands of Europe, the Habsburg Empire resisted all the standard theories of singular sovereignty. The 1848 revolutions sparked decades of heady constitutional experimentation that pushed the very concept of “the state” to its limits. This intricate multinational polity became a hothouse for public law and legal philosophy and spawned ideas that still shape our understanding of the sovereign state today. The Life and Death of States traces the history of sovereignty over one hundred tumultuous years, explaining how a regime of nation-states theoretically equal under international law emerged from the ashes of a dynastic empire.

Natasha Wheatley shows how a new sort of experimentation began when the First World War brought the Habsburg Empire crashing down: the making of new states. Habsburg lands then became a laboratory for postimperial sovereignty and a new international order, and the results would echo through global debates about decolonization for decades to come. Wheatley explores how the Central European experience opens a unique perspective on a pivotal legal fiction—the supposed juridical immortality of states.

A sweeping work of intellectual history, The Life and Death of States offers a penetrating and original analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and time, illustrating how the many deaths and precarious lives of the region’s states expose the tension between the law’s need for continuity and history’s volatility.

--Dan Ernst

Zhang's "Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation"

Taisu Zhang, Yale Law School, has published The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press):

How states develop the capacity to tax is a question of fundamental importance to political science, legal theory, economics, sociology, and history. Increasingly, scholars believe that China's relative economic decline in the 18th and 19th centuries was related to its weak fiscal institutions and limited revenue. This book argues that this fiscal weakness was fundamentally ideological in nature. Belief systems created through a confluence of traditional political ethics and the trauma of dynastic change imposed unusually deep and powerful constraints on fiscal policymaking and institutions throughout the final 250 years of China's imperial history. Through the Qing example, this book combs through several interaction dynamics between state institutions and ideologies. The latter shapes the former, but the former can also significantly reinforce the political durability of the latter. In addition to its historical analysis of ideological politics, this book makes a major contribution to the longstanding debate on Sino-European divergence.

Here are some encomia:

A theoretically elegant, evidence-rich, and innovative explanation for why imperial China declined and fell. The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation sheds light on the roots of the 'Great Divergence' in economic development between China and Europe. A tremendous achievement that deserves to be widely read.' Yuhua Wang, Professor of Government, Harvard University

'This book is a brilliant new take on comparative economic history. Skillfully integrating institutional analysis, economics, and political thought, Zhang provides us with an erudite, deeply learned account of the Qing's failure to expand tax capacity, drawing us into contemplation of a path not taken.' Tom Ginsburg, Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law, University of Chicago

'In this refreshing and incisive work, Taisu Zhang shows us how the weakness of the late Qing regime depended less on structural constraints than on a specific worldview about the proper role of the state. Low taxation was a deliberate choice, made in response to the presumed lessons of history, and it would have far-reaching implications. This will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand long trends in Chinese political development.' David Stasavage, Julius Silver Professor, New York University

'In this characteristically ambitious book, Taisu Zhang looks for obstacles on China's path to modernization in a surprising place: tax capacity. He explains the unwillingness of China's nineteenth-century rulers to raise taxes neither in terms of eternal cultural values nor structural factors, but rather as the outcome of a specific type of conservatism that can be explained historically.' Michael Szonyi, Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University

--Dan Ernst

CFP: Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives

[We have the following call for papers. DRE]

Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives.  September 14-15, 2023; Bologna, Italy.  An international conference sponsored by University of Illinois College of Law; University of Bologna Department of Legal Studies; and the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development (Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe–University of Bologna)

Paper proposals are invited for the Fifth Illinois-Bologna conference on Constitutional History: Comparative Perspectives. The conference will be held in Bologna at the Department of Legal Studies of the University of Bologna on September 14-15, 2023.  The conference keynote speaker will be Professor Miroslaw Granat, former Justice of the Constitutional Court of Poland.  

Accompanying the spread of constitutional government around the world has been a profound interest in the comparative aspects of constitutional law. Scholars have catalogued the differing features of national constitutions and examined how different constitutional systems resolve common legal issues. So, too, judges faced with legal questions have sought guidance in the decisions of constitutional courts of other nations. While comparative constitutional law is therefore a well-established field, less attention has been paid so far to the comparative dimensions of constitutional history. This international conference series aims to address that shortcoming by energizing the study and analysis of constitutional history from comparative perspectives. It provides a forum for presentation and discussion of current research on issues of constitutional history that cross national boundaries. It also brings together scholars who, at present, are working on constitutional histories of single jurisdictions—with the expectation that conversations among these scholars will allow for sharing of methodologies and point also to fresh areas of research that may transcend national boundaries.

For 2023, the focus of the conference is Landmark Judgments.  Landmark judgments are foundational decisions that, rather than merely resolving a concrete case, set a key precedent, introduce a major legal principle or concept, or substantially impact the trajectory of the law. Such judgments, typically issued by Supreme Courts and Constitutional Courts, are found throughout the world. Examples include Marbury v. Madison (1803) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the United States; Reference re Secession of Quebec (1998) in Canada; Décision Liberté d'association (1971) in France;  the Lüth Judgment (1958) in Germany; and S v Makwanyane and Another (1995) in South Africa.

Landmark judgments in constitutional cases invite numerous questions that can benefit from comparative analysis. How do landmark judgments become landmark? What is their history? What determines their trajectory? What kinds of influence do these leading cases exert at the domestic level? When, how and to what extent do landmark judgments exert influence in other jurisdictions? Do landmark judgments gain different meaning when they travel abroad? Who decides whether a case qualifies as a landmark? Do some jurisdictions produce more landmark judgments than others? How easy is it to challenge, overturn or displace a landmark decision? Can a ruling be a landmark if it is widely perceived as erroneous?  What is the role of landmark judgments outside of the courts, in the political sphere and in society more generally?

We invite papers that consider these and related questions about landmark judgments in constitutional cases and that can serve as the basis for a discussion among scholars interested in exploring landmarks from a comparative perspective. Papers that focus on a single jurisdiction—and even a single case—are welcome as are papers that examine landmark judgments from multiple jurisdictions.  

Scholars interested in presenting a paper at the conference should first e-mail a title and summary of the proposed paper along with a CV to Professor Jason Mazzone at mazzonej[@]illinois.edu. There is no word limit for the proposals but proposals in the range of 500-1,000 words are typical. Proposals received by April 1, 2023, will receive priority. After that date, submitted proposals will be considered if space remains.

For those whose abstracts are accepted, draft papers will be required for circulation to other participants three weeks prior to the conference.

Subject to the usual requirements of peer review, papers from the conference will be published as a single volume by Brill. Authors who accept an invitation to present a paper at the conference must agree to have the paper included in the published volume. Additional information about length and formatting requirements for the final versions of the papers will be provided to authors.

Conference participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation expenses.

Fleming on "Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice"

Cambridge University Press has published In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice (2022), by Michael Fleming (Polish University Abroad, London). A description from the Press:

In the midst of the Second World War, the Allies acknowledged Germany's ongoing programme of extermination. In the Shadow of the Holocaust examines the struggle to attain post-war justice and prosecution. Focusing on Poland's engagement with the United Nations War Crimes Commission, it analyses the different ways that the Polish Government in Exile (based in London from 1940) agitated for an Allied response to German atrocities. Michael Fleming shows that jurists associated with the Government in Exile made significant contributions to legal debates on war crimes and, along with others, paid attention to German crimes against Jews. By exploring the relationship between the UNWCC and the Polish War Crimes Office under the authority of the Polish Government in Exile and later, from the summer of 1945, the Polish Government in Warsaw, Fleming provides a new lens through which to examine the early stages of the Cold War.

A sample of advance praise:

"This pathbreaking book sheds important new light on post-war attempts to prosecute Nazi war criminals and collaborators through an analysis of the participation in the United Nations’ War Crimes Commission of representatives of the Polish government, first that established in the west after the Polish defeat and then by the pro-communist government established by the Soviets. It is essential reading for all those interested in the problem of how to prosecute genocide and crimes against humanity." -- Antony Polonsky

 More information is available here. (h/t New Books Network)

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Tangier Statute Centenary Conference

[We have the following Call for Papers.  DRE.]

Tangier Statute Centenary Conference, 18 December 2023, Tangier.

On 18 December 2023 (i.e. a year from now), Willem Theus (KU Leuven – UCLouvain), Dr Michel Erpelding (University of Luxembourg), Prof Dr Francesco Tamburini (University of Pisa), Prof Dr Fouzi Rherrousse (University of Oujda), and [Geert van Calster] are organising a conference to celebrate the centenary of the Statute of Tangier, signed at Paris. Credit for kicking off the process goes to Willem.

This treaty, signed between France, Spain and the United Kingdom, and later joined by Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy, provided for the creation of a new legal entity: the International Zone of Tangier. Established by 1925, the Tangier Zone was formally an integral part of Morocco, but subject to a special regime that left most of its institutions under the joint administration of several Western powers. This special regime would last until Morocco’s independence in 1956, with some international elements remaining in place under a Royal Charter until 1960.

Thinking about the Zone triggers an extravaganza of thoughts on international commercial courts, conflict of laws, history of law and so much more. The call asks for papers on

The Politics of Individual Powers Towards/Within the Zone
Moroccan Attitudes and Policies Towards/Within the Zone and Its Institutions
The Interzonal and Foreign Relations of the International Zone17
Politics in the International Legislative Assembly
The Veto-Role of the Committee of Control
The Zone’s Legal System/Codes
The Operation, Case Law and Reforms of the Mixed Court
The Bar of the International Zone

Careers of Individual Lawyers/Officials/Businessmen/Intermediaries
The Tangier Banking System
The Ecclesiastical, Jewish and Sharia Courts
The Working and Case Law of the American Consular Court
The Spanish Civil War and its Impact on the Zone
The Architecture of the International Administrative Buildings of the Zone
Smugglers and the Law; and
The Legal System of the Transition Period (1956–1960)

The call and further details are available in Arabic, English, French, Italian and Spanish.

Dippel's "Modern Constitutionalism"

Horst Dippel, professor emeritus of British and American Studies at the University of Kassel, has published Modern Constitutionalism: Origin and Manifestations. England - North America - France - Germany - Europe/European Union - Latin America (Talbot Publishing, 2022):

Dippel assesses the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 12 June 1776 and shows how its ten principles made it the founding document of modern constitutionalism, which subsequently spread across the United States and, beginning with the French Revolution, Europe and Latin America. He shows how these principles were always confronted, in varying degrees, by resistance and opposition and always enriched, modified, or diluted by local or regional variations. With multiple examples from the 17th through the 21st centuries, Dippel shows both what a global and individual national history of modern constitutionalism might look like and how it would help us to better understand the present constitutional situation of individual American and European states, as well as the world we live in.

–Dan Ernst

Hatzis on Byron and Stanhope's Greek Newspapers

Aristides N. Hatzis, University of Athens, has posted Establishing a Revolutionary Newspaper: Transplanting Liberalism in a Pre-Modern Society, which appeared in Human Rights in Times of Illiberal Democracies: Liber Amicorum in Memoriam of Stavros Tsakyrakis, ed. (Nomiki Vivliothiki, 2020), 293-317:

In late 1823 two representatives of the London Philhellenic Committee (a Philhellenic group established to support the Greek War of Independence from Ottoman rule) arrived in Missolonghi in Western Greece to administer a loan to the revolutionary Greek government and help the Greek cause. The visit of Lord Byron and Col. Leicester Stanhope was short. Lord Byron died in early April of 1824 and Col. Stanhope was recalled to Britain one month later. During this short period, they managed to establish three newspapers in liberated Greece but also to antagonize each other on the ideology and content of these newspapers. The objective of Stanhope was to disseminate Bentham’s liberal ideas in Greece and the objective of Byron was the international recognition of the Greek War of Independence. Their never-ending fights led to the first major episode of newspaper censorship in the history of modern Greece: Byron confiscated an issue of a newspaper because he thought it was damaging to the revolutionaries’ international standing and he tried to undermine Stanhope’s position by discrediting him to the London Committee. Stanhope did the same by accusing Byron of illiberalism. Byron and Stanhope were also involved in the civil war that erupted during the revolution. Their brief stay in Greece brought out major antinomies in their conceptions of liberty, liberalism, democracy and radicalism but also of national interest and revolution. In this paper I am presenting the establishment of three newspapers by Byron and Stanhope, their inevitable conflict and the different ways they perceived the ideas of liberty by drawing on their extensive correspondence and on the memoirs of Byron’s companions to the Greek adventure.

--Dan Ernst

Ehrlich at Max Planck

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory is hosting a conference on Eugen Ehrlich. 

100 years after his death, Eugen Ehrlich is perhaps better known than he was then. Today, he is considered a pioneer of legal pluralism, the father of the sociology of law and the founder of the free law movement. Of course, he was no stranger to the world even during his lifetime. But he taught and worked mainly on the fringes of the Habsburg Empire in the Bucovina until World War I drove him from there. The conference on 29 and 30 September 2022 will be devoted to this enigmatic and original figure of the early 20th century in four panels (1.) on Eugen Ehrlich and his historical contexts, (2.) on the reception of Eugen Ehrlich, (3.) on Eugen Ehrlich as a jurist and (4.) on his relevance today.

–Dan Ernst

Dhondt on Gilissen and the Teaching of Legal History

Frederik Dhondt, Legal History Institute/Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns Institute of International Law, has posted John Gilissen and the Teaching of Legal History in Brussels, which appears in Teaching Legal History - History of Legal Teaching, ed. Lukasz Korporowicz (Acta Universitatis Lodziensis - Folia Iuridica 99 (2022), 19-50:

John Gilissen (1912–1988) was a high-profile legal academic at the Université libre de Bruxelles (°1834) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (°1969). Personal – albeit fragmentary – archival records deposited with these universities permit to reconstruct his teaching (both ex cathedra-courses for big groups and intensive tutorials), impressive global scientific network and insatiable scientific curiosity. Gilissen is the author of standard works on many aspects of domestic legal history (both public and private), and acquired renown as the secretary-general of the Société Jean Bodin pour l’histoire comparative des institutions. His influential position as a public prosecutor, law professor and legal historian generates a unique insider’s perspective on the confessional, linguistic and constitutional transformation of the country from World War One to the First Reform of the State. The current law curriculum at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel still bears marks of Gilissen’s comparative approach to the history of civil law and his interest in the contemporary relevance of institutional history. 

--Dan Ernst

German Legal History 2022

[We have the following announcement of German Legal History Conference 2022.  DRE.]

Forms of Validity of Law

Legal norms claim to be binding and thus valid. However, their validity cannot be taken for granted.  Depending on its social, political, economic and cultural environment, legal normativity is described in very different ways, and its declared binding and enforced by very different mechanisms.  The presentations, talks and discussions of the 43rd Legal History Conference will identify, analyze, and compare notions and limits of "legal validity" at different historical stages.  

Plenary lectures will ask about types and forms of legal validity in antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern and the modern period.  

In contrast, the sections of the Legal History Conference will focus on special contexts and problematic situations of the rule of law. With legal pluralism, the much-discussed question of the coexistence and, if necessary, also coexistence of claims to validity of different legal norms is examined. The section on arbitration focuses on the validity of legal norms and their application beyond the state. In the section on religious rights, the question is asked how and in what way the validity of law arises in the context of religious associations, sometimes in competition with secular sovereign rule. The interstate sphere of the rule of law is the subject of the section on the history of international law. The section “Media Change and Law” is devoted to the interdependence of the rule of law and the medial shaping of law. Last, but not least, the importance of specialized legal knowledge for the validity of law is the subject of the section “Expert Cultures of Law”.  

The validity of law, its foundations, its limits, and its content have repeatedly become questionable in the present. The 43rd Legal History Conference 2022 offers a broad historical horizon of reflection also and especially to these debates.

Book Launch: "King Leopold's Ghostwriter"

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE.]

The Queen Mary School of Law, School of History, the Institute for Social Sciences and the Humanities and the Centre for the History of Political Thought, Queen Mary University of London, are delighted to be co-hosting a New Book Symposium on Professor Andrew Fitzmaurice’s King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 2022). The event is organised by Professor Maksymilian Del Mar and Professor Georgios Varouxakis.  In addition to Professor Fitzmaurice, the speakers are Professor David Armitage (Harvard); Professor Michael Lobban (LSE); Professor Lisa Siraganian (Johns Hopkins); and Dr. Inge Van Hulle (Max Planck, Frankfurt).

de Brouwer on Belgian Lawyers under German Occupation

We have it that on February 18, at 12:00 (we assume Madrid time), the next session of the Colloquium on the History of Law of the faculty of law at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid will take place.  Jérome de Brouwer, Université Libre de Bruxelles, will present "'Tout pour l'honneur': Belgian Lawyers under German occupation (1914-1918)."  The session will take place via Zoom: ID Zoom: 829 1079 8716 | Access code: 609743.

"The Making of Consumer Law and Policy in Europe"

Just out from Bloomsbury: the anthology The Making of Consumer Law and Policy in Europe, edited by Hans-W Micklitz.

This book analyses the founding years of consumer law and consumer policy in Europe. It combines two dimensions: the making of national consumer law and the making of European consumer law, and how both are intertwined.

The chapters on Germany, Italy, the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom serve to explain the economic and the political background which led to different legal and policy approaches in the then old Member States from the 1960s onwards. The chapter on Poland adds a different layer, the one of a former socialist country with its own consumer law and how joining the EU affected consumer law at the national level. The making of European consumer law started in the 1970s rather cautiously, but gradually the European Commission took an ever stronger position in promoting not only European consumer law but also in supporting the building of the European Consumer Organisation (BEUC), the umbrella organisation of the national consumer bodies.

The book unites the early protagonists who were involved in the making of consumer law in Europe: Guido Alpa, Ludwig Krämer, Ewa Letowska, Hans-W Micklitz, Klaus Tonner, Iain Ramsay, and Thomas Wilhelmsson, supported by the younger generation Aneta Wiewiórowska Domagalska, Mateusz Grochowski, and Koen Docter, who reconstructs the history of BEUC. Niklas Olsen and Thomas Roethe analyse the construction of this policy field from a historical and sociological perspective.

This book offers a unique opportunity to understand a legal and political field, that of consumer law and policy, which plays a fundamental role in our contemporary societies.

--Dan Ernst

Aloni on the League of Nations and the Environment

Omer Aloni, Bar-Ilan University, has published The League of Nations and the Protection of the Environment (Cambridge University Press):

In the history of how the law has dealt with environmental issues over the last century or so, the 1920s and 30s and the key role of the League of Nations in particular remain underexplored by scholars. By delving into the League's archives, Omer Aloni uncovers the story of how the interwar world expressed similar concerns to those of our own time in relation to nature, environmental challenges and human development, and reveals a missing link in understanding the roots of our ecological crisis. Charting the environmental regime of the League, he sheds new light on its role as a centre of surprising environmental dilemmas, initiatives, and solutions. Through a number of fascinating case studies, the hidden interests, perceptions, motivations, hopes, agendas and concerns of the League are revealed for the first time. Combining legal thought, historical archival research and environmental studies, a fascinating period in legal-environmental history is brought to life.

–Dan Ernst