Crossing boundaries. Legal History between Methodological Approaches and new Challenges and Identities

Kolloquium Methoden für die Rechtsgeschichte

  • Datum: 08.09.2020
  • Uhrzeit: 14:00 - 16:00
  • Vortragende(r): Luigi Lacchè (University of Macerata / LUISS ‘G. Carli’ Rome)
  • Ort: Online. Für weitere Informationen wenden Sie sich bitte an ruether@rg.mpg.de
 Crossing boundaries. Legal History between Methodological Approaches and new Challenges and Identities

 

In this presentation, I will reflect on the ‘state of the art’ in legal history regarding several emerging methodological issues and challenges. The aim here is simply to connect some specific and personal experiences in the field of legal history with various trends in the current international debate. Over the last few decades, legal history has changed certain traditional ‘orientations’ and is currently undergoing a complex transition. How are we to deal with new proposals and visions within the discipline, and how should we manage the strategic relationship between tradition and innovation? What should our response to new concepts be, and perhaps most importantly, how can we share the contents and approaches of legal history with other disciplines? 

Of course, I do not claim to offer definite answers to these difficult questions. Instead, I merely aim to put various questions on the table and frame them in a productive manner. Along the way, I will also point out some interesting areas of confrontation and dialogue. The need for legal history to ‘open itself up' to other disciplines and epistemological dimensions should be recognised. The notion of crossing boundaries can also entail a methodological approach – in fact, a never-ending journey – based more on ‘contamination’ and ‘exchange’  than on a 'claim to purity'. The contemporary identity of legal history is the result of a process of transformation, and we should no doubt concede that, as legal histories – in the plural – have proliferated, ‘legal history’ has, by the same token, lost some of its compactness. Our task then, and certainly a challenging one, is to find a fruitful balance between this space of ‘common identity’ and this concern to ‘cross boundaries’.

Some references:

Crossing boundaries. Comparative constitutional history as a space of communication, in Glossae. European Journal of Legal History, 15, 2018, pp. 126-139, available http://www.glossae.eu

(History of) Law and Other Humanities: When, Why, How, in History of Law and Other Humanities: Views of the Legal World across the Time, edited by Virginia Amorosi and Valerio Massimo Minale, Serie de Monografías: Historia del Derecho, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Madrid, Dykinson, 2019, pp. 25-43, http://hdl.handle.net/10016/28313

Sulla Comparative Legal History e dintorni, in A. Somma, M. Brutti (eds.), Diritto: storia e comparazione. Nuovi propositi per un binomio antico, Frankfurt am Main, Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, Global Perspectives on Legal History, 2018, pp. 245-265

Intervento, in Ripensare la transizione come categoria storiografica: uno sguardo interdisciplinare, con C. Cornelißen, L. Scuccimarra e Bo Stråth, a cura di G. Bernardini e M. Cau, in Ricerche di storia politica, XXI, 2, agosto 2018, pp. 193-195

(with E. Calzolaio) Justice and Injusticiability. Perspectives and issues between history and comparison, in Justice and Injusticiability. Perspectives and issues between history and comparison, ed. by E. Calzolaio, L. Lacchè, Wien, LIT Verlag, 2019, pp. 3-14

(with Massimo Meccarelli), Storia delle giustizia e storia del diritto: prospettive di ricerca in ambito europeo, Macerata, eum, 2012

History & Constitution. Developments in European Constitutionalism: the comparative experience of Italy, France, Switzerland and Belgium (19th-20th centuries), Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 2016

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