Speaking about Codifications: Some Remarks from the Perspective of Global Legal History

This lecture will present how a German legal historian tries to understand the historical processes of exchange of legal knowledge in times of globalization. Setting the codifications in global perspective, Thomas Duve will start the lecture with a brief introduction (I). He will give the remarks on the history of globalization of law and legal scholarship in the 19th and 20th century (II). In the third part, he will give an overview about how a complex process like the Civil Law codification in China has been traditionally analyzed, hinging on the transnational exchange of knowledge (III). In the fourth section, he will explain how and why it could be helpful to understand these phenomena as a process of production of normative knowledge as “cultural translation” (IV).