The course of Legal History aims at providing for a complex understanding of the relationship between law, society, economics, culture, and politics through time. The student will learn the basic development of law from the late antiquity to the 20th Century. The course will connect basic historical learning with specific legal-historical questioning, focussing mainly on the moments of crisis or renovation which determined the principal features of Western legal systems.
teacher profile teaching materials
The historical range of the course is very broad: it extends from late Antiquity to Middle Ages, to Modern and Contempoary eras.
James Q. Whitman, The World Historical Significance of European Legal History: An Interim Report, in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, edited by Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey Oxford University Press 2018
Other readings will be suggested during the course, and will form part of the compulsory materials for the exam.
Programme
The main aim of the course is to grasp some general narratives of the history of legal practice and legal doctrines over a very long period. The knowledge of historical sources and historical contexts is necessary to build those general narratives. The course will deal with legislations and their political frameworks, some legal literature and some main figures of legal authors. On the base of these sources, some aspects of the legal institutions which were adopted in different historical periods will be presented.The historical range of the course is very broad: it extends from late Antiquity to Middle Ages, to Modern and Contempoary eras.
Core Documentation
Tamar Herzog, A Short History of European Law. The Last Two and Half Millennia, Harvard University Press, 2018James Q. Whitman, The World Historical Significance of European Legal History: An Interim Report, in The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History, edited by Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D. Dubber, and Mark Godfrey Oxford University Press 2018
Other readings will be suggested during the course, and will form part of the compulsory materials for the exam.