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Organizer: Dr. Piotr Alexandrowicz (piotr.alexandrowicz@amu.edu.pl)
This lecture series is organized by the oldest Polish journal of legal history, Czasopismo Prawno-Historyczne (CPH; Legal History Journal), published by the Faculty of Law and Administration at AMU since 1948 (https://pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/cph). The editor-in-chief of CPH, Dr. Hab. Maksymilian Stanulewicz, a professor at AMU, warmly invites all interested scholars and students to participate in our online lectures and to submit papers to CPH.
The second lecture series in legal history organized by CPH includes four lectures related to both European legal tradition and comparative legal history. Our distinguished speakers will offer fresh insights on a variety of topics, providing a complex framework for assessing the value of comparative legal history for legal science in general. The first lecture by Prof. Aniceto Masferrer will provide us with a bird’s-eye view of legal history and its relevance for law and legal science. The second lecture by Prof. Dirk Heirbaut will be a masterclass in comparative legal research on the classic issue of codes and codification over the last two hundred years. With the third lecture by Prof. Wim Decock, we will delve into the complex realm of the early modern period, exploring its entanglement of canon law, Roman law, and moral theology. In the concluding contribution by Prof. Tommaso Beggio, we will have an opportunity to follow the development of the idea of punishment by prison and the use (or misuse) of Roman law in the European legal tradition.
After each open lecture, there will be a follow-up closed seminar for interested early career researchers (graduate students, PhD candidates, postdocs). If you would like to participate in one of these seminars, please contact the organizer.
Date: October, 10th, 4:00 pm CEST
Link to the online meeting: https://bit.ly/legalhistory2-1
Prof. Aniceto Masferrer is Professor of Legal History and teaches legal history and comparative law at the Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Spain. He has been a fellow researcher at the Institute Max-Planck for European Legal History (2000-03), Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (2005), Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (2006-07) and at Melbourne Law School (2008), and Visiting Professor at the University of Tasmania (2010), Visiting Scholar at Louisiana State University – The Paul M. Hebert Law Center – (2013), Visiting Scholar at George Washington University Law School (as the Recipient of the Richard & Diane Cummins Legal History Research Grant for 2014), and Visiting Professor at the École Normale Supérieure – Paris (2015), Center for Advanced Study, CAS, Oslo (2021, 2022), Università degli Studi Roma Tre (2022), Università degli Studi de Bari Aldo Moro (2023), Harvard Law School (2024). He has lectured at universities around the world (France, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Malta, Israel, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
He is the author of ten books (including The Making of Dignity and Human Rights in the Western Tradition. A Retrospective Analysis, Springer, 2023; and Spanish Legal Traditions. A Comparative Legal History Outline, Madrid, 2009; 2012, 2nd ed.) and the editor of fourteen (including A Companion to Western Legal Traditions: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, Brill, 2023; Comparative Legal History, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), and more than hundred book chapters/articles published in Spanish, European and American law journals. He has published extensively on criminal law from an historical and comparative perspective, as well as on the codification movement and human rights in the Western legal tradition.
Abstract: Law is characterised by its historicity. The historical study of law gives a peculiar perspective on law and legal science. In fact, if law is a human reality characterised by its ‘historicity’ and its study corresponds to historical reason, the legal historian is the one who can have the most authentic understanding of Law, the most real or in accordance with reality. If the law is made throughout time, it cannot be adequately understood without its historical development. Law – like any human being and all human realities – “always carries all its past on its shoulders”. Ignorance of this past would imply ignorance of the very reality of Law itself.
What is the purpose of studying legal history? The lecture will try to answer this question. In doing so, three important purposes of the historical knowledge of law will be underlined: a) its proper understanding (both past and current law); b) its adequate interpretation and application (current), and c) its convenient reform (current).
In addition, the historicity of law also encompasses the need to go from the text to the context, analyzing the contribution of comparative perspective and the history of ideas to both a legal-historical method and a critical and comprehensive understanding of law.
Website: https://www.uv.es/masdoa/curriculum-aniceto-masferrer.html
Chair: Prof. Michał Gałędek (University of Gdańsk)
Date: November, 12th, 4:00 pm CEST
Link to the online meeting: https://bit.ly/legalhistory2-2
Prof. Dirk Heirbaut studied law and history and currently teaches as a senior full professor at Ghent University. His research focuses on medieval feudal and customary law, the comparative history of private law codifications, private law in Belgium since Napoleon and the methodology of legal history. He is a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts and the Academia Europaea and a member of the board of editors of several reviews, particularly the Legal History Review/Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, and series, particularly Studies in the History of Private Law and Iuris Scripta Historica. He serves as president of the Legal History Committee of the Flemish Academy and was a founding vice-president of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. He sat on the Scientific advisory board of the MPI Private Law in Hamburg and currently sits on the advisory board of the MPI Legal History in Frankfurt. He worked as a guest professor or guest researcher in Amsterdam, Bergen, Berkeley, Brussels, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Louvain-la-Neuve, Oslo, Paris and Uppsala. In 2014 the city and the university of Magdeburg awarded him the Eike von Repgow prize. He has published six books, more than a hundred articles and book chapters and (co-)edited more than 20 volumes. His forthcoming book Redefining Codification deals with the history of civil, commercial and procedural codes in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium from the end of the eighteenth century until the twenty-first century.
Abstract: This lecture will communicate some of the research results of my upcoming book Redefining codification. A comparative history of civil, commercial and procedural codes. Most countries in the world have codes. Still, there is considerable debate about the concept of code/codification. I will, therefore, first study existing literature on this topic. Previous publications distinguish between mere compilations and true or modern codes. The latter are original, innovative, comprehensive, coherent, consistent and accessible texts regulating an area of the law for the whole nation. This ideal view of a true code does not survive contact with the empirical reality of civil, commercial, and civil procedure codes in four countries (France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands), which I have studied from the late eighteenth century until now. Therefore, I propose a redefinition of the concept, based on the empirical material and not on lofty aspirations, that were irrealistic around 1800 and even more today. Whether this definition may also be valid for other fields of law, eras, or countries (e.g. codifications in Poland), other than the ones I have studied, is a question I leave to my audience. At least from what I have studied, it becomes clear that some evaluations of codes as defective reveal more about the irrealistic concept of code/codification used so far than about the actual possibilities and limits of codifications. In short, we need to reevaluate our view of past and present codes.
Website: https://research.ugent.be/web/person/dirk-heirbaut-0/en
Chair: Prof. Jan Rudnicki (University of Warsaw)
Date: December, 4th, 4:00 pm CEST
Link to the online meeting: https://bit.ly/legalhistory2-3
Prof. Wim Decock (1983) is professor of Roman law, legal history and comparative law at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve. He also teaches legal history on a part-time basis at the University of Liège. Before joining UCLouvain, Decock was a research professor at the Flemish University of Louvain (KU Leuven) in Leuven. From 2012 through 2014 he led a junior research group at the Max-Planck-Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. Decock received his PhD in law in 2011 from the universities of Roma Tre and KU Leuven with a dissertation on the theological origins of contract law that won several prizes, including the H. M.-Leibnitz-Prize 2014 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Michael Novak Award 2017. In 2020, he was awarded the VWS-Prize by the Royal Flemish Academy for his more recent book on the early modern foundations of the economics of meritocracy. Decock holds master degrees in classics (KU Leuven, summa cum laude) and law (Ghent Univ, summa cum laude). In 2021, he was elected associate member of the Royal Academy of Overseas Sciences in Brussels. In 2022, Decock was the recipient of a Max Planck-Humboldt medal.
Abstract: In this conference I would like to highlight the “recycling” of Roman law in theological writings, especially in the early modern period (16-17th centuries). Eager to provide answers to concrete cases of conscience in the field of private law, commercial law and public law, moral theologians, also known as the “scholastics”, heavily drew on Justinian’s legal texts, trying to reconcile them with larger principles derived from ancient and medieval virtue ethics. I will argue that, as a result, an extraordinarily fruitful, “theological use of the Pandects” (Usus theologicus pandectarum) emerged. To a certain extent, it can be seen as an integral part of the wider contemporary phenomenon of re-appropriation of Justinian’s Corpus iuris civilis (Usus modernus pandectarum). Incidentally, many of the jurists associated with the Usus modernus pandectarum were quite familiar with the interpretation of Roman legal texts in the writings of early modern Roman-Catholic theologians. As will be shown, this should not come as a surprise, especially considering the sophistication of theologians’ exegesis of Roman legal texts.
Website: https://uclouvain.be/fr/repertoires/wim.decock
Chair: Prof. Wojciech Dajczak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań)
Date: January, 16th, 4:00 pm CEST
Link to the online meeting: https://bit.ly/legalhistory2-4
Prof. Tommaso Beggio was born in 1983; M.A. in Roman law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Trento; Ph.D. in Diritto romano e cultura giuridica europea at the Law Faculty at the University of Pavia (2008-2011). He won a position as post-doc researcher (2013-2017) in the ERC project Reinventing the Foundations of European Legal Culture, 1934-1964 (P.I.: Prof. Kaius Tuori), at the University of Helsinki, where he carried out a research on Paul Koschaker and Roman law under the Nazi regime. There he held the courses Roman Law in European History and Law, Totalitarianism and Human Rights. He spent a 14 months research stay at the University of Heidelberg in 2015-2016, where he held the course Einführung in das italienische Recht. In 2018 he won the programme for young scholars “Rita Levi Montalcini” – “rientro dei cervelli” and obtained a position as a researcher at the Law Faculty at the University of Trento. The “Rita Levi Montalcini” funded his research project on Capital punishments in Roman law for three years too. In 2021 he obtained the chair for Diritto romano e diritti dell’Antichità at the University of Trento.
Main research fields: Roman public (and criminal) law, Roman criminal and civil procedure, legal epigraphy, Roman law historiography (in particular, Paul Koschaker, the “School” of Ludwig Mitteis, and the development of the vergleichende Rechtsgeschichte).
Abstract: A traditional view among legal historians that dates back to the 19th century, and based on a text by the jurist Ulpian that we can find in the Digest (D. 48.19.8.9), affirms the idea that the use of the jail (carcer) as a punishment was unknown to the Romans, who conceived the prison only to keep the convicts in custody. According to this opinion, the prison was the place where to confine convicted persons awaiting trial and awaiting punishment and could only serve as a form of preventive detention. Yet, several different measures developed in ancient Rome over the centuries that eventually led to the deprivation of freedom or to a condition of dependency as a result of a punishment inflicted by the judge, or as the outcome of a situation of personal culpability. These penalties have represented a reference for the repressive systems in the West in the following centuries. Nonetheless, the medieval glossators and commentators constantly affirmed that the prison could not be used as an instrument to punish the convicts, but only to keep them in custody, on the basis of their interpretation of Roman law sources, but their stance actually concealed a hiatus between theory and praxis and prison was nevertheless sometimes inflicted as a punishment. Moreover, both in practice and in Canon law the prison began to emerge as an instrument to punish people and as an alternative to the death penalty well before the age of the Enlightenment: also in this case though, the legal basis to legitimise this different use of the prison were found in the Roman law sources.
Website: https://webapps.unitn.it/du/it/Persona/PER0025648/Curriculum
Chair: Prof. Maciej Jońca (University of Szczecin)
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