Rechtsgeschichte Legal History

The founding director of the institute was Helmut Coing (1964-1980). Dieter Simon (1980-2003), Walter Wilhelm (1970-1994), Michael Stolleis (1991-2006) and Marie Theres Fögen (2001-2008) later became directors of the institute. After his retirement in 2006, Michael Stolleis became Executive Director of the Institute until 2009. In 2010, Thomas Duve, the new director and scientific member, took over the management of the institute. Stefan Vogenauer joined the Executive Board in 2014. Marietta Auer has been Director of the Institute since 1 September 2020 and has since headed a third Department of Legal Theory. At the turn of the year 2020/2021, the institute was renamed and has since been called the Max Planck Institute for History and Theory of Law. Cooperation in the Rhine-Main region, in particular with the Goethe University Frankfurt, plays an important role in this respect. Through the Pole of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” or the Collaborative Research Center “Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes”, the Institute and the University jointly contribute to the creation of a sustainable research place on normativity. Together they also created “The Salamanca School” as a long-term research project at the Mainz University of Sciences and Letters, thus succeeding in combining research perspectives in the fields of legal history and philosophy. [2] Under the direction of Helmut Coing, the Institute`s research focused on the history of private law in Europe and its correlation with economic history. Dieter Simon, Walter Wilhelm, Michael Stolleis and Marie Theres Fögen have successively broadened the Institute`s research spectrum to include legal theory and sociology, the history of public law, international law, criminal law, modern Eastern European law and 20th century dictatorship Europe.

With the appointment of the new Director Marietta Auer, the Institute has dedicated a third department to legal theory, thus broadening its field of research. Since 2021, this expansion is also reflected in the name, which now takes a global view of legal history and theory, thus avoiding a Eurocentric approach. The journal has an international focus and pursues a multilingual approach to reflect the diversity of global legal and research cultures. Each issue contains articles on a specific “theme”, a section entitled “Debate” or “Forum” that summarizes brief and stimulating contributions to a current academic debate, and a “Research” section with a selection of outstanding articles on issues of broader interest to legal historians. Reviews of recently published books on legal history can be found in the “Criticism” section of the journal. Legal History – Legal History (Rg) is published by the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and edited by editors Marietta Auer, Thomas Duve and Stefan Vogenauer. The aim of the journal is to be a high-level research forum on all branches of legal history. Its scope therefore reflects the full scope of the discipline and is not limited to specific periods or specific areas of law. His particular profile stems from the research of the Institute of Legal History of Europe, the common law worlds and the Iberian monarchies. The institute`s interdisciplinary research, specialized library with more than 470,000 press articles, publications and numerous institutional and international collaborations provide a unique research environment for legal historians and other researchers from around the world. Over the past sixty years, the Institute has become one of the central research centers of the global scientific community engaged in the study of our past and present national and transnational legal systems.

This year`s research section begins with Elizabeth Papp Kamali`s study of the consequences of excessive alcohol consumption in medieval English criminal law. Jan Schröder offers a detailed analysis of sources to study the meaning of words in early modern legal and linguistic theories. The editors of the four-volume Handbook on the History of Conflict Resolution in Europe (Peter Collin, Wim Decock, Nadine Grotkamp, David von Mayenburg, Anna Seelentag) explain the conceptualization of this reference work (published in 2021) and give a brief overview of some of the models and general ideas resulting from this large-scale project. One of the particular challenges of the Institute is to create a historical and empirical basis for a critical examination of the legal system in the era of globalization. To this end, the Institute is increasingly focusing on the interrelations between European and non-European legal systems.