Many researchers also point to the need for expertise and skills in comparative legal history. The availability of sources is a central challenge: the history of comparative law requires access to primary texts, which are not always easily accessible outside the place where they were written. Many of these primary texts are also in unedited manuscripts, and historians of comparative law may need to master several languages to understand them correctly. [1] Thanks to Criticallegalthinking, we have read this call for proposals in paper form. The discipline has definitional challenges. The history of comparative law cannot be easily distinguished from historically informed comparative law. [5] The words « comparison », « law » and « history » are difficult to define precisely, and their combination leads to additional uncertainty as to the scope of intellectual research in the history of comparative law. [5] [14] The adoption of norms in the Roman world is manifested in the production of objects, the use of units of measurement, the construction of infrastructure, but also in the symbolic representations of power by means of material culture, as well as in the use of model contracts or the reproduction of writings of legal formula. The effective application of these norms shows that individual beliefs, cultural norms and formal institutions have been coordinated to build trust between the parties.
Rome has seen a proliferation of such abstract systems of trust, for example, through the use of standard weights and measures that have profoundly influenced people`s lives, from the most public to the most intimate. However, one of the paradoxes of the Roman world is that, while standard objects or practices that reflect Roman influences spread to different regions, the expansion of these in many cases involved the development or assimilation of foreign practices, objects or concepts, the mixing of cultural traditions, or rather the strengthening of self-identity at the local level. A key example is the weights used in various ports in the eastern Mediterranean that translated Roman imperial units into local units. This international conference is dedicated to the study of the manifestations of standardization and localisms in the law and economy of the Roman world and consequently their impact on various phenomena such as symbols, legal culture or commercial practices, but also on material culture, infrastructure and landscapes. The event also aims to recontextualize norms not only as echoes of Roman domination, but also as evidence of various socio-economic practices and intercultural encounters, and how these are materially reflected that reflect themes such as integration, assimilation, resilience or a combination of imperial and provincial practices. In Sino-European comparative legal history, comparison is rarely used as an analytical tool to better understand European institutions, but for European researchers to understand Chinese institutions by analogy with their own systems. Studies of European history analytically color the study of other legal traditions, which means that it is not possible to treat them on their own terms or in their own legal language. [10] In Korean-European legal history, some scholars have drawn false analogies between « custom » in European and North Korean legal systems. [11] This type of contextual knowledge serves two functions. First, the conceptual structures of the different legal systems must be understood and addressed in order to avoid translation errors. For example, different legal systems treat legal phenomena differently, so that a question of tort in one system could be a question of contract in another. « Custom » is a key term in both medieval English law and Korean Chosŏn law, but in the latter it is used interchangeably to refer to practices, ancient customs, customary and customary law.
The term « precedent » is also used in both legal systems, but it refers to judicial decisions in the first and administrative decisions in the second. [11] Second, comparative work requires a thorough understanding of legal culture, particularly with respect to the relationship between case law and legal outcomes. The role of lawyers and jurists, for example, can vary considerably from one legal culture to another. [1] [11] [40] Contemporary feminist jurisprudence seems to have no history and almost no canonical text. Unlike other fields of the humanities and social sciences, there is a lack of interest in issues of feminist heritage in law; a certain reluctance to engage in the intellectual and/or textual traditions of feminism. Individual studies, however radical or sophisticated they may be, seem to be situated solely in the « feminist present », » so that the past of legal feminism is free of any inheritance worthy of transmission. The first two decades of the 21st century brought with them a renewal and crystallization of the study of comparative legal history. [22] The European Society of Comparative Legal History (ESCLH) was founded in 2009, followed by the European Journal of Comparative Legal History in 2013. The EsCLH has held six biennial conferences starting in 2020 and hosts a variety of prizes and competitions for historical research in comparative law. [14] The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History has also established a Department of Comparative Legal History to conduct research on the « European and comparative dimensions of the history of law. » [24] Outside Europe, the title of the 2020 conference of the American Society for Comparative Law was « Comparative Legal History »[25], and studies of colonial history increasingly brought with them legal historical comparisons. [18] In modern times, it has also received judicial recognition.
[26] Although not explicitly recognized as comparative legal history, the legal-historical comparison is present in a large number of works from antiquity to the Middle Ages. In Politics, published in the 4th century BC. Aristotle refers to constitutional law and the history of 158 Greek city-states to argue that the organization of a political community can lead its citizens to live a life of virtue. About five hundred years later, the Church Fathers passed from Tertullian (155 AD – 240 AD) to Augustine of Hippo (354 AD – 430 AD). Comparisons between Jewish laws and customs and the texts of early Christianity.
