Jasper Kunstreich‘s research project ,The Economics of Legal History‘, aims to integrate economic theory and history with legal history, offering a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the evolution of legal frameworks. His project is grounded in the idea that Europe's transformation into modern capitalism was driven by institutional and legal changes, aligning with the principles of New Institutional Economics. The research highlights the significant role of law in public choice theories and the emerging field of law and political economy, which often draw on historical legal precedents. However, legal history has yet to fully engage in this interdisciplinary dialogue.

The recent issue of our Institute’s journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (Rg) presents high-level research contributions and candid reviews of books on topics that are relevant for the field of legal history, in Germany and worldwide. Three essays are dedicated to the legal history of slavery in the early modern and modern periods: Carlo Bersani traces the European legal discourse on servi and personae (16th–18th century). Matilde Cazzola looks at the efforts to abolish slavery in British Caribbean, and Tamar Herzog analyses some aspects of the historiography of the legal history of slavery, a field so far dominated by Atlantic history. The issue is now available in print from the Vittorio Klostermann publishing house, and online in Open Access via the journal's website.

Volume 24 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History aims to contribute to the understanding of the development of knowledge on the ‘criminal question’ as it circulated to and from the Argentinian context between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Around 1880, new perspectives on crime and punishment, initially also based on ideas imported from European contexts (e.g. the ‘Positivist School’ in Italy), began to be discussed in Argentina; this challenged the fundamental arguments in the realm of criminal law. Emphasising how the transnational circulation of ideas contributed to this transformation, the collected articles analyse the dynamics of adaptation, rejection and interaction between the Global North and the Global South.