CFP: Grotian Law and Modernity at the Dawn of a New Age

[We have the following CFP.  DRE]

Grotian Law and Modernity at the Dawn of a New Age: 400 Years of De jure belli ac pacis, 1625-2025
International Conference, 19-20 June 2025, Leiden University Wijnhaven Campus, The Hague

On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the first publication of De jure belli ac pacis by Hugo Grotius in 1625, an international conference will be organized by the Grotiana Foundation, the Paul Scholten Centre for Jurisprudence at the University of Amsterdam, the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at the University of Leiden and the Department of Public Law and Governance at Tilburg University.

The major aim of the conference is to foster new narratives on the thought of Grotius, in general legal theory as well as in international law against a the backdrop of present-day rapid, fundamental changes that challenge the very foundations of the modernist paradigm, of which Grotius may be considered a key trailblazer. The core question of the academic conference is to what extent Grotian thought about general legal theory and international law is still relevant today, and what adaptations current foundational changes to our world make necessary. In this context, discussion of the many trajectories of reception, appropriation and reinterpretation of Grotius in different times and places, offers a valuable, additional perspective.    

The organizers invite twelve speakers for each of the three thematic parts of the conference.  Candidates are requested to send in an abstract of 250-400 words and short c.v. of max. 100 words to the general convener, Randall Lesaffer (lesaffer@tilburguniversity.edu) by 1 May 2024. Please mention your affiliation and indicate a preference for one of the three conference themes.

Part I ‘Lineages of Grotian Thought’
Convener: Mark Somos
Keynote speaker: Martine van Ittersum

Part II ‘Modernity and the dawn of a new age: general theory of law and
governance’
Convener: Marc de Wilde
Keynote speaker: Annabel Brett

Part III ‘Modernity and the dawn of a new age: international law and governance’
Convener: Eric De Brabandere
Keynote speaker: Hilary Charlesworth

Speakers are expected to turn in a draft paper before 1 June 2025. Papers will be distributed to the participants in advance of the conference. Those papers which pass peer review will be published in both the journal Grotiana (New Series) as well as collected in a separate book with Brill.  More information here.

Pufendorf's International Political and Legal Thought

Peter Schröderr, Professor of the History of Political Thought, University College London, has published the essay collection Pufendorf's International Political and Legal Thought in the Oxford University Press’s series, The History and Theory of International Law.  The TOC is here.

Contemporary research on the genealogy of human rights and the foundations of international law has brought renewed interest to the study of natural law in the early-modern period. German-born Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) is one of the eminent thinkers of this tradition, shaping the period's natural jurisprudence.

This unique collection of essays edited by historian of political thought Peter Schröder fills in a gap in Pufendorf scholarship, exploring the significance of his contributions to political and legal thought on a broad scale. While many books studying Pufendorf's work are confined to one specific academic area, Pufendorf's International Political and Legal Thought is truly interdisciplinary, and the first book to substantially address the international aspect of Pufendorf's work.

Ambitious and accessible, this collection is indispensable for scholars and students of intellectual history, political thought, international legal history, the Enlightenment, and political economy. With its focus on international law, Pufendorf's International Political and Legal Thought is a critical addition to the existing body of work on this renowned philosopher and jurist.

--Dan Ernst

Communicating the Law in Europe (1500-1750) Scholarship 2024

 The University of St Andrews has issued the following announcement:

Communicating the Law in Europe (1500-1750) Scholarship 2024

Two fully funded PhD studentships are available at the University of St Andrews to work as part of the ERC-selected/UKRI-funded project ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’, under the supervision of the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen. The project investigates how law was communicated in early modern Europe (c. 1500-1750), and what impact this had on European society.

The PhD studentships will begin in September 2024, will be based in the School of History at the University of St Andrews (with significant periods to be spent on research abroad), and will last for four years. 

These PhD studentships offer the successful applicants the exciting prospect of combining the pursuit of an independently researched thesis exploring a particular dimension of legal and political communication in early modern Europe with the opportunity to work collaboratively within a research team and to contribute to co-authored publications and the organisation of scholarly conferences.

The ‘Communicating the Law in Europe, 1500-1750’ project has been awarded a grant of €1.4 million by the European Research Council and is funded as part of the UKRI’s Frontier Research Guarantee scheme.  It will run for five years, from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2028, and is led by the Principal Investigator, Dr Arthur der Weduwen.

The COMLAWEU project is the first to investigate comparatively how law was communicated to citizens and subjects by the authorities in early modern Europe (1500-1750). It pursues an original comparative study of the publication and circulation of municipal, regional and national law, encompassing oral communication, ceremonial proclamations and the employment of criers, as well as the affixing, distribution and sale of law texts, in manuscript and printed form.

Based on extensive archival research, this project will seek to establish for the first time to what extent the increasing body of law that was issued in early modern Europe was made publicly available, and in what forms.

The project seeks to add a new and much-needed perspective to the study of European politics in a critical era of state formation, framing the communication of law as an essential stabilising factor in an era of highly participatory but undemocratic politics.

This project will offer multiple comparative frameworks through which the communication of law will be studied, including Protestant and Catholic states, urban and rural areas, and empires, national kingdoms and city-states.

With the aid of such a comparative lens, it is an overarching aim of the project to analyse how the public dissemination of law shaped early modern civic society and influenced political participation and accountability.

The project team, led by the PI and comprising two postdoctoral research assistants and two PhD students, will work collaboratively, using a series of comparative case studies based on European regions to explore and reveal the complex ways in which European authorities communicated with their citizens and subjects.

Further details about this opportunity can be found on the School of History postgraduate funding page.

-- Karen Tani

CFP: Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

[We have the following announcement.  DRE.  H/t: MW.]

Objects of Law in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.  Universität Bern, Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Aug 29–30, 2024.  Deadline: Nov 1, 2023.  Corinne Mühlemann und Fatima Quraishi

Materials and texts function in a variety of ways in legal contexts, they forge diplomatic ties, grant gifts of land, levy taxes, regulate markets, etc. In the medieval and early modern worlds, these objects took on many different guises. Some were highly ornate objects, such as Fatimid marriage contracts where text was embroidered on woven silk, or tablets of authority produced in gold, silver or wood which allowed travelers to cross the Mongol Empire without difficulty, or wax seals imprinted with imperial images protected in textile bags. Other objects facilitated the execution of law in everyday life; glass weights, stamps for marking loaves of bread, length standards embedded in architecture, volume standards. The connection between the materiality of these artefacts and the law are multiple, their very nature conveyed information, performed authority, and communicated authenticity.

Although legal objects fall between disciplinary categories, their texts have been the main subject of scholarship. The conference, Objects of Law, proposes thinking more deeply about the artistic practices that shaped the materiality, iconography, and texts of legal objects in the medieval and early modern period. What forms did these objects take? How did their form confer authenticity and legal authority? What training or knowledge are evident in the objects? Objects of Law seeks dialogue between scholars working in art history, history, archaeology, legal history, and related disciplines that deal with legal objects. We welcome contributions from all geographical regions that relate to the medieval and early modern period. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

- The role of objects in legal practices
- The aesthetics of objects of law
- The artistic practices of crafting legal objects

Proposals should consist of an abstract in English for 30-minute papers (max 2000 characters incl. spaces) and a brief biography (max 1500 characters incl. spaces) in a single document (pdf or word). They should be submitted to: Corinne Mühlemann (corinne.muehlemann@unibe.ch) and Fatima Quraishi (fatimaq@ucr.edu) by November 1, 2023. Graduate students are highly encouraged to apply. Conference participants will be provided with accommodation in Bern for 3 nights and some travel expenses will be covered.

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.

Calabritto, "Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna"

Penn State University Press has published Murder and Madness on Trial: A Tale of True Crime from Early Modern Bologna (2023), by Mònica Calabritto (Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center). A description from the Press:

On October 24, 1588, Paolo Barbieri murdered his wife, Isabella Caccianemici, stabbing her to death with his sword. Later, Paolo would claim to have acted in a fit of madness—but was he criminally insane or merely pretending to be? In this riveting book, Mònica Calabritto addresses this controversy by reconstructing Paolo’s life, prosecution, and medical diagnoses.

Skillfully combining archival documents unearthed throughout Italy, Calabritto brings to light the case of one person and his family as insanity ravaged their financial security, honor, and reputation. The very notion of insanity is as much on trial in Paolo’s case as the defendant himself. A case study in the diagnosis of insanity in the early modern era, Barbieri’s story reveals discrepancies between medical and legal definitions of a person’s mental state at the time of a crime. Murder and Madness on Trial bridges the micro-historical dimensions of Paolo’s murder case and the macro-historical perspectives on medical and legal evidence used to identify intermittent madness.

A tragic and gripping tale, Murder and Madness on Trial allows readers to look “through a glass darkly” at early modern violence, madness, criminal justice, medical and legal expertise, and the construction and circulation of news. This erudite and engaging book will appeal to early modern historians and true crime fans alike.

Praise from reviewers:

“Murder and Madness on Trial, in dialogue with both historians of medicine and social and legal historians, paints a complex and rich picture of early modern madness. Thanks to the unusual abundance of the documentation of the case—legal, medical, literary—Calabritto describes in detail a nuanced case of murder, illness, and conflict of expertise, interpretation, and political cultures.”—Paolo Savoia

“When a young Bolognese nobleman prone to delusion and rage slaughtered his well-born wife in 1588, the shocking crime set off a drama that drew in men of law and medicine, stirred up the city’s chronicles, and subverted the host family’s authority for decades to come. Murder and Madness on Trial ties everything together in a literary, medical, legal, and social history that traces discordant understandings of crime and mental illness and tracks the crime’s lasting repercussions within the wider family.”—Thomas V. Cohen

More information is available here. An interview with Professor Calabritto is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani

Research Property in the Iberian World at Max Planck

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt/Main is a world leader in fundamental research on law. Its three research departments with more than 60 scholars, the unrivaled collections of its specialized library, and its numerous national and international co-operations make it the central research hub for a global scientific community investigating the past, present, and future of legal regimes.

We are looking to recruit from March 2022 onwards, three PhD researchers (m/f/d/) for the ERC research group IberLAND, "Beyond Property: Law and Land in the Iberian World(1510-1850)"  directed by Dr. Manuel Bastias Saavedra, with a case study compatible with the following focus: (1) Goa (and Old Conquests), 1510-1630; (2) New Spain, 1520-1630; (3) Cape Verde, 1600-1730.

IberLAND explores the history of land tenure in a long-term and global perspective by focusing on the territories of the former Portuguese and Spanish empires in what has recently been labelled the Iberian world. The Iberian crowns of Portugal and Castile, beginning in the 15th century, connected diverse peoples and communities across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In doing so, they for the first time transformed the questions of how to own and how to use land into an issue of global dimensions. While this age of discovery and colonialism has often been regarded as the first phase of the transplantation of European concepts of property from Europe to the non-European world, IberLAND seeks to disrupt this narrative by looking at the history of land tenure not as a process of diffusion from Europe to the world, but as a process of decentred legal innovation. To do this, the project will move beyond the idea of property and focus on land relations to understand the sets of social relations established between people and land. This conceptual approach provides a way of observing how law was produced at the local level through the combination of practice and doctrine. To connect legal doctrines to local practices, the project's analysis will focus on different sets of institutions that structured land relations in different places in the Iberian world. This conceptual and analytical framework will be applied to six case studies focusing on New Spain, Goa, Cape Verde, Spain, Brazil and the Philippines, enabling us to overcome the diffusionist mindset that has pervaded the study of law and empire.

A Conference on the Ius Commune in Early Modern Europe

[ We have the following announcement.  DRE]

Astorri on Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany

Here's a 2019 publication that we missed somehow: Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (ca. 1520-1720) (Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2019), by Paolo Astorri (post-doc at the Center of Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen; faculty member at the Catholic University of Leuven). A description from the Press:

It is clear that the Lutheran Reformation greatly contributed to changes in theological and legal ideas – but what was the extent of its impact on the field of contract law? Legal historians have extensively studied the contract doctrines developed by Roman Catholic theologians and canonists; however, they have largely neglected Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Johann Aepinus, Martin Chemnitz, Friedrich Balduin and many other reformers. This book focuses on those neglected voices of the Reformation, exploring their role in the history of contract law. These men mapped out general principles to counter commercial fraud and dictated norms to regulate standard economic transactions. The most learned jurists, such as Matthias Coler, Peter Heige, Benedict Carpzov, and Samuel Stryk, among others, studied these theological teachings and implemented them in legal tenets. Theologians and jurists thus cooperated in resolving contract law problems, especially those concerning interest and usury. 

H/t New Books Network, where you can find an interview with the author.

-- Karen Tani

Dowling, Keyser and friends on conservation in pre-industrial Europe

 Abigail Dowling (Mercer University) and Richard Keyser (University of Wisconsin-Madison) have co-edited Conservation's Roots: Managing for Sustainability in Preindustrial Europe, 1100-1800, now out with Bergahn Books. From the press: 

The ideas and practices that comprise “conservation” are often assumed to have arisen within the last two centuries. However, while conservation today has been undeniably entwined with processes of modernity, its historical roots run much deeper. Considering a variety of preindustrial European settings, this book assembles case studies from the medieval and early modern eras to demonstrate that practices like those advocated by modern conservationists were far more widespread and intentional than is widely acknowledged. As the first book-length treatment of the subject, Conservation’s Roots provides broad social, historical, and environmental context for the emergence of the nineteenth-century conservation movement.

There are legal themes and sources throughout this book's chapters. Table of Contents after the jump: 

Weekend Roundup

• HistPhil has launched an "online forum marking the 200th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Dartmouth College v. Woodward, a landmark decision in shaping the legal landscape of U.S. civil society." Here's the first contribution, by Johann Neem (Western Washington University).

• In Custodia Legis (the blog of the Law Librarians of Congress) spotlights some of its Spanish Legal Documents (15th-19th centuries).

• OMB/NARA Memorandum on Transition to Electronic Records: “By 2022, [the National Archives and Records Administration] will no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata.”

• Call for Papers: The Fourth Biennial Public Law Conference, University of Ottawa Law School, Common Law Section, 17-19 June 2020.

•  ICYMI: Chieftains Museum Host Exhibition on Legal Aspects of Cherokee Removal in Georgia (from the Coosa Valley News). James Thornton Harris on Charles Reich and The Greening of America on HNN.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Tang on early modern European literature and international law

Chenxi Tang, University of California at Berkeley, published Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 in 2018 with Cornell University Press. From the publisher; 

In early modern Europe, international law emerged as a means of governing relations between rapidly consolidating sovereign states, purporting to establish a normative order for the perilous international world. However, it was intrinsically fragile and uncertain, for sovereign states had no acknowledged common authority that would create, change, apply, and enforce legal norms. In Imagining World Order, Chenxi Tang shows that international world order was as much a literary as a legal matter. To begin with, the poetic imagination contributed to the making of international law. As the discourse of international law coalesced, literary works from romances and tragedies to novels responded to its unfulfilled ambitions and inexorable failures, occasionally affirming it, often contesting it, always uncovering its problems and rehearsing imaginary solutions.

Tang highlights the various modes in which literary texts—some highly canonical (Camões, Shakespeare, Corneille, Lohenstein, and Defoe, among many others), some largely forgotten yet worth rediscovering—engaged with legal thinking in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In tracing such engagements, he offers a dual history of international law and European literature. As legal history, the book approaches the development of international law in this period—its so-called classical age—in terms of literary imagination. As literary history, Tang recounts how literature confronted the question of international world order and how, in the process, a set of literary forms common to major European languages (epic, tragedy, romance, novel) evolved.

Praise for the book: 
 "Imagining World Order is one of the most engaging books to appear in the field of early modern comparative literature. Tang’s analysis of the histories of early modern literary genre and the emergent discourse of international law is ambitious, significant and could not be more convincing."
- John Watkins

"Chenxi Tang’s work is remarkable, as is the scope of the study: spanning texts of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries while situating its discussion in relevant classical and medieval antecedents. This book will make a welcome contribution to scholarship on the history of law and New Diplomatic History."
- Mark Netzloff

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi