Constitutional Hi-stories

Three New Volumes by Michael Stolleis

When it fails to explain broader connections, constitutional history is merely an archival exercise, debates in constitutional law are effectively blind without historical context, and constitutional theories uninformed by historical context are empty. Constitutional history can develop models for constitutional law while simultaneously depending on those models. At the moment, the experience of the Weimar Republic, which profoundly shaped the early history of post-war Germany, seems to be fading. In its place, current debates about the future of Europe and the consequences of globalisation tend to invoke pre-modern experiences of multinormativity from the Middle Ages and the dawn of the modern era along with concerns about the durability of state monopolies of violence. The constitutional hi-stories with commentaries by Christoph Gusy and Anna-Bettina Kaiser have just been published by Mohr Siebeck in the Fundamenta Juris Publici series.

Two of Michael Stolleis’s earlier works have also recently appeared in translation. His studies on the legal history of National Socialism Recht im Unrecht (‘Law in Injustice’) have been available in French since last year, and Oxford University press has just published his introduction to the history of public law in English.

• M. Stolleis, Verfassungs(ge)schichten, mit Kommentaren von Christoph Gusy und Anna-Bettina Kaiser, Fundamenta Juris Publici 6, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2017
• M. Stolleis, Le droit à l'ombre de la croix gammée. Études sur l'histoire du droit du national-socialisme. La croisée des chemins, ENS Editions Lyon 2016
• M. Stolleis, Public Law in Germany. A Historical Introduction from the 16th to the 21st Century, Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2017