Histories of Constitutional and Administrative Law in Brief

Michael Stolleis’s latest publication is an introduction to methods of researching the histories of constitutional and administrative law as well as to the history of public law as a field of study. Through a selection of case studies, the volume discusses similarities and differences between these subdisciplines as well as their mutual entanglements. It also succinctly considers how to approach sources, which are especially abundant in these areas. A final, practically oriented section treats the transition from the previous, nationally oriented constitutional and administrative legal histories to a comparative European history of the emergence of the modern state, its changing ‘constitutions’, and the evolution of administrations from early modern principalities to the modern, debordered, interventionist state. All these processes are traced with reference to a broad array of scholarly literature. Reflecting on them historically and connecting them with their political contexts is an indispensable supplement to constitutional and administrative history. Thus, the perspective shifts from national to European constitutional history, and from there to comparative global and extra-European constitutional history, of which historicising European law since 1945 is an important component.

The volume is part of the Institute’s methodica series from de Gruyter.