Schiedsstaatlichkeit. Balancing of State and Private Interests by Arbitral Institutions in the Germany of the German Empire and the Weimar Republic

Research Project

From the end of the 19th Century, the organization of societal interests intensified in non-state institutions, albeit often those closely linked to the state. Their roles were manifold: the creation of regulations and guidelines, social and financial self-help, ensuring education and quality standards, ensuring professional discipline, sometimes implementing the sovereign authority of the state. To a large extent, however, self-regulation institutions also acted as institutions in which conflicts were argued out in a formal process – conflicts which were not delivered to state jurisdiction or in which the state only acted as a secondary authority. Usually operating as resolution, arbitration or conciliation boards, these institutions had a variety of forms: They could be located within an existing organization (e.g. courts of arbitration in professional associations) or created for conflicts between different organizations (e.g. arbitration boards for disputes resulting from covering agreements between the umbrella organizations of private banks, public saving banks and credit unions) or be set up by the authorities but staffed by representatives of societal groups (e.g. rental arbitration offices).

Although familiar, these forms of conflict resolution have so far hardly been appraised from the point of view of legal history. The project is designed to close this research gap and examine this kind of institution, including as an alternative model to the state monopoly on jurisdiction (and to the administrative state monopoly on decision-making). The most attention will be paid to the question of the extent to which, through the way such institutions functioned, the interaction between the state’s ambitions of control and the efforts of sectors of society to maintain self-organization were realized.

Publications