Methods of Global legal History

Completed Project

Each scholarly discipline requires continuous reflection on its methods. This is particularly true for legal history, for which the last decades’ discussions on global history have raised fundamental questions about its definition of law as well as concerning the path dependencies of its themes, methods and practices. What would a legal history look like that tried to transcend the traditional approaches deriving from and focusing on nation states? Starting with an article in 2012, Thomas Duve has in various publications critically engaged with the analytical traditions of European legal history and offered three new areas of reflection – ‘translation’, ‘multinormativity’ and the question of the construction of legal spaces – that seemed particularly important for a global legal history. A particular focus of his current work is the connection between the history of knowledge and legal history, and the question of how we can understand legal history as the history of the production of normative knowledge. These issues were the subject of various talks held in 2018 and 2019 (e.g. in Buenos Aires, Tallin, Boston, Lucerne). A small monograph summarising this work is planned. In the research project on pragmatic literature which was completed in 2019, some methodological and theoretical considerations in the field of moral theology could be implemented in research practice (published in April 2020 as the first volume of the new open-access series Max Planck Studies in Global Legal History of the Iberian Worlds at Brill). It is also planned to summarize the work of recent years in a small monograph.

Important publications in this research project (selection)

Books, Special issues

Articles, Book Chapters

Picture: Source: Planisphere by Rumold Mercator, 1587 (Wikimedia Commons)