News and Notices

Daniel Damler seeks the normative where it does not present itself as law, where it becomes spatial and visual. For his research projects, he looks beyond the executive and supervisory boardrooms to examine law in relation to architecture, and interprets the fictional world of Gotham City as a visual symbol of a state of emergency. His latest project focuses on Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), chronicler of the Conquista, courtier and notary, whom Alexander von Humboldt revered as the Pliny of the New World. Damler examines his life and work, in addition to his programmatic struggle for truth and reality. We asked him what determines whether an unconventional subject is suitable for legal history, and what does a research project gain by publishing its findings as a novel. more

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. more

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. more

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.  more

Erica Kim Ollikainen-Read explores how the ‘myth of Magna Carta’ travelled to India and was reinterpreted by the British colonisers and by the Indian people in their struggle with Britain as a colonial authority. In particular, the project examines Queen Victoria’s 1858 Proclamation to the ‘Princes, Chiefs, and People of India’. This was considered by contemporaries to be ‘India’s Magna Carta’ and has recently been studied as a ‘constitutional antecedent’ to India’s modern constitutional history.  more

A trademark once did one job: tell a shopper who made a product and what to expect. So why does it now behave like property? Parand Yaghubi traces how courts and legislators expanded trademark protection into something property-like, and asks the larger question behind it: when is such an expansion of legal protection justified at all? more

Volume 28 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History places social rights at the center of the Weimar Constitution’s long journey to China. It tells a global legal history of how jurists and legislators used constitutional language to conceptualize 20th-century projects of social transformation. Fupeng Li maps the routes by which German Staatsrechtslehre and the Weimar Constitution’s concept of social rights entered Chinese debates. more

The “Prize for European Administrative History”, endowed by Prof. emeritus Erk Volkmar Heyen (University of Greifswald), honours outstanding research by early‑career scholars. The prize combines recognition of completed academic work with support for an innovative new research project. The 2025/26 award goes to Dr Cosima Götz, in recognition of her doctoral dissertation “Metropolises in Competition: Urban Planning and Urban Societies, 1890–1940”, published by Wallstein Verlag. The study takes as its point of departure the widely shared conviction around 1900 that societal futures were to be shaped in and through urban space. more

A new volume in our Policey series draws on neglected files of the Oberste Justizstelle to examine criminal justice under the Habsburg monarchy in the Vormärz period, tracing criminality and deviance in Tyrol and Vorarlberg alongside the stereotypical perceptions Viennese judges held of the "Italian part of Tyrol". Combining legal history with criminality studies and discourse analysis, it opens a window onto Austrian social history and everyday life in the early 19th century. more

Jan Schröder's Recht als Wissenschaft has been a standard reference on the history of legal methodology since its first publication. A new commentary volume, edited by Marietta Auer, Ralf Seinecke and Stefan Vogenauer, now examines the central arguments of this work critically: Which periodisations does it establish, which narratives does it choose, and which alternatives does it set aside? more

In volume 351 of Studies in European Legal History , Reinhard Zimmermann offers a vivid portrait of the life, work and influence of Ernst Heymann (1870–1946): from the Prussian-trained Germanist and legal historian who in 1914 succeeded Heinrich Brunner to the most prestigious Legal History chair in the Germanist tradition at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin, to the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, which he headed from 1937 until his death in 1946 – having taken over from founding director Ernst Rabel, whom the National Socialists had forced to resign. more

Google, Amazon, Microsoft: three corporations that today control more infrastructure than most states can regulate. Anselm Küsters calls this behavioural power – and in his new book Small is beautiful 2.0, he has developed a counter-programme: open source, decentralised platforms, a theory of competition that takes democracy seriously as a protected good. Küsters completed his doctorate at our institute, conducts research at Humboldt University in Berlin and heads the Digitalisation Department at the Centre for European Policy (cep) more

In volume 350 of the Studies in European Legal History, Tim Knoche examines the legal term albacea of the Spanish Código Civil, as the result of a multi-stage legal reception, from the Islamic waṣī through the Mozarabic and Castilian documentary practice of Toledo to its internal Castilian spread, exemplified by late medieval document practice in Christian-dominated Seville. more

Germany likes to see itself as progressive on family policy. But when it comes to inheritance, that progress ends. In a recent legal column in Merkur, our director Marietta Auer argues that German inheritance law still reflects a 1950s model of the bourgeois nuclear family. Her key points: the law treats wealth as “family property” rather than individual ownership, penalizes those who leave assets to friends or siblings with inheritance taxes of up to 50 percent, and contradicts political rhetoric that celebrates diverse family forms. In practice, true freedom of testation ends once you move beyond the traditional core family. more

Volume 332 of the Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte explores the growing differentiation of German legal science around 1900. It traces the emergence of new subdisciplines, shifting self-understandings within established fields, and lively debates in legal philosophy, theory, and sociology, highlighting the conditions under which a plural and differentiated jurisprudence took shape. more