Ius Commune in the Making: The Place of Legal Sources in the History of Private Law

The 21st Ius Commune Conference will take place in Maastricht from 24-25 November 2016, and a panel will be devoted to the role of legal sources in the history of Private Law.

Legal changes can be often explained by attending the interaction of legal actors, legal sources, and legal institutions. Legal sources indeed play an important role and occupy a paramount place in the shaping of private law. They offer the necessary building blocks for private law, together with a playfield for legal actors and legal institutions. The current Workshop builds on a previous Workshop on Comparative Legal History held during the 19th Ius Commune Conference and that explored the role of legal actors.

The current Workshop aims now to explore the place of legal sources promoting or hindering changes in private law. Perspectives will be extracted from different time periods, including Roman law, Ius commune, nineteenth-century codification, and the more recent efforts towards an European private law harmonization. The praetorian Edict, medieval glosses and commentaries, early modern handbooks on natural or customary law, collections of judicial decisions since the end of the early modern period, the modern codifications all related differently to legal and societal changes. The question is whether these sources promoted private law to be in harmony (Einklang) with society and societal changes.

Abstracts:

Senior researchers and PhD candidates are invited to submit an abstract of a paper related to the above mentioned theme. Abstracts (aprox. 400 words) should be sent to Agustin Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl) by July 20, 2016.

For further information, please contact:

Harry Dondorp (j.h.dondorp@vu.nl)
Michael Milo (j.m.milo@uu.nl)
Pim Oosterhuis (janwillem.oosterhuis@maastrichtuniversity.nl)
Agustin Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl)

JEV Research Fellowship for European Administrative History 2017

The research fellowship is donated by Professor Erk Volkmar Heyen who until his retirement had been holder of the chair of Public Law and European Administrative Law at the Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald. He was also the editor of the “Jahrbuch für europäische Verwaltungsgeschichte/Yearbook of European Administrative History” (JEV). His awarding is based on a selection procedure organized by the Max Planck Institute.

Applications for the year 2017 can be submitted until 30 September 2016.

For further information please s click here or email Dr. Peter Collin (collin@rg.mpg.de)

As we approach the centenary in 2019 of women’s admission to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland, lawyers and legal scholars have initiated several projects to mark this achievement which aim to uncover and recover the history of women’s experiences of law. These include the Women’s Legal Landmarks project, the First 100 Years project and the First Women Lawyers in Great Britain and the Empire Symposium series. This is a golden age for legal scholars undertaking historical work on women and law and for historians working on legal issues.

At the same time, many scholars involved in these and other projects face challenges of methodological insecurity, if not ignorance, because they are working outside their own discipline and sources. Women’s legal history, while well-developed in North America, is still in its infancy in the UK and Ireland.

A conference will take place at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studes in London on 26 October 2016.

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars working in the field to share experiences of doing women’s legal history, to learn from each other, and to build and develop the discipline of feminist legal history (that is, women’s legal history from a feminist perspective) in the UK and Ireland.

Plenary speakers

There will be two plenary speakers at the conference:

• June Purvis, feminist historian, editor of the Women’s History Review and convenor of the Women’s History Network, who will talk about researching the suffragette movement from a feminist perspective and how the suffragettes have so often been represented by traditional (usually male) historians as mad, irrational, and damaging to the cause of votes for women; and
• Gillian Murphy from the Women’s Library at the LSE, who will discuss the holdings of the Women’s Library including both primary and secondary sources relevant to scholars working on women’s legal history.

Abstracts

If you are interested in presenting a paper at the conference, please submit a title and abstract of 250 words to the organiser, Rosemary Auchmuty, to whom enquiries on the academic content of the conference should also be addressed. Email:r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 31 July 2016.

Enquiries

For general enquiries please contact: Belinda Crothers, Academic Programmes Manager Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR. Email: Belinda.Crothers@sas.ac.uk

For additional information please click here or  contact ials.events@sas.ac.uk.

The American Society for Legal History’s annual conference 2016 takes place in Toronto, Ontario from 27-30 October. Details about the conference and how to book are available here.

On 27 October, a one-day  workshop will be held at the downtown campus of Osgoode Hall Law School to increase awareness of digital legal history, and encourage discussion of how digital methods and technologies can be used to analyze and present the legal past, and of new initiatives to undertake such projects.

The workshop combines an extended showcase of four projects that each employs a different approach — O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law and Family; The Lawyers’ Code: Tracking the Migration and Influence of the Field Code; Digital Harlem; and Voices of Authority: the Old Bailey Courtroom — and a set of hands-on workshops offering a beginner-level introduction to the methods used in those projects. Further details are available on the workshop website.