Each year, a new cohort of young scholars joins our Summer Academy, a two-week program of seminars, research, and debate at the intersection of legal history and theory. Participants examine how law has been attacked, defended, and transformed - from abolitionist petitions to postcolonial constitutions, from courtrooms to the streets. The theme of this year’s Academy draws on a provocation by Rudolf von Jhering, who wrote in 1872 that “the life of the law is a struggle.” For him, law emerged not from consensus, but from conflict - between states, classes, and individuals. It’s an idea that still resonates in battles over reparations, decolonization, and civil rights.

Xinran Liu’s PhD project ”Glocalising Local Self-Government in Late Imperial China” analyzes a turning point in China’s legal history: the Local Self-Government movement of the late Qing. At stake was more than administrative reform, it was an attempt to remake imperial subjects into citizens and to stabilise a collapsing empire from the ground up. Liu analyses this movement not as a one-way reception of Western ideas, but as a contested reconfiguration of governance knowledge. Drawing on Thomas Duve’s concept of “Glocalisation of Knowledge of Normativity,” he seeks to uncover the shifting assumptions, legal, ideological, and epistemic, that underpinned reform efforts. 

Sexueller Missbrauch durch Kleriker ist kein neues Phänomen. Bereits lange vor den heutigen Schlagzeilen setzte sich die christliche Kirche mit der Frage auseinander, wie zu reagieren sei, wenn Amtsträger selbst zu Tätern wurden. In Sexueller Kindesmissbrauch und Sodomie im mittelalterlichen Kirchenrecht rekonstruiert Kevin Kulp, wie das kirchliche Recht mit solchen Vergehen umging – in einer detaillierten rechtshistorischen Untersuchung, die sich von der Spätantike bis zur Reformation erstreckt. Der Band ist der vierte Beitrag im Themenfeld Recht im ersten Jahrtausend und erscheint in der Reihe Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte (Band 345).