The School of Salamanca has been hailed as the cradle of international law and criticised as a legal fig leaf for empire. Our director Thomas Duve argues that both accounts tend to reduce the School to its contribution to international law and overlook the authors who espoused the same ideas in Mexico, Córdoba or the Philippines. Moreover, the authors in Salamanca were part of a larger discourse. He and his department have held this view for years; recently he explained it to a wider audience in El Mundo, a leading Spanish daily.

Volume 2 of Studies in Legal Theory is about Hermann Kantorowicz who was a formidable legal scholar in the turbulent first three decades of the 20th century, a leading participant in the ‘renaissance’ of legal philosophy in Germany. He gained an international reputation as a legal historian and legal theorist (and no small notoriety for his contrarian, combative views). He first formulated a ‘free law’ theory in Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft in 1906, his bold strike against orthodox jurisprudence. 

In the Italian territories of Naples and Milan during the 18th century, the judicial system was a main area of reform efforts aimed at bringing the courts further into the sphere of influence of the respective territorial ruler. Drawing on three reform initiatives from each territory, volume 354 of the Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte traces the institutional changes within the courts. It reconstructs these reforms as historically open processes of negotiation, thereby offering a new perspective that takes into account the complexity of these processes. The study shows that these judicial reforms were not the work of individual “enlightened” rulers, but rather an expression of an institutional and social struggle between various actors for power and influence over the courts.