A journal for digital legal history

In some cases it can be very hard to find the right words for a post about a particular subject. Luckily announcing a new journal is a different matter! A few weeks ago the Journal for Digital Legal History has been launched by the Universiteit Gent on its platform for scientific journals in open access. The editors-in-chief of the new journal are Dirk Heirbaut, Annemiek Romein and Florenz Volkaert. Among the seven members of the editorial board are for example Andreas Wagner, officer for digital humanities at the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt am Main, and Stephen Robertson (George Mason University). Familiar names in the advisory board are Serge Dauchy (Lille), Thomas Duve (MPILHLT), Heikki Pihlajamäki (Helsinki) and Dave de Ruysscher (Tilburg).

In their opening statement the editors-in-chief explain the need for a journal devoted to digital legal history as a wish expressed by several scholars during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year at the online digital legal history conference in March 2021 organized by the MPILHLT – reviewed here – scholars from Ghent did not hesitate to mention their wish to create and host a new journal with this particular focus. Other journals might devote more or less regularly space for articles on digital legal history, but creating a special platform is indeed welcome and sensible, too. Not just subjects touched by both legal history and digital humanities should get space in the JDLH, but digital methods, too, need to be presented, reviewed and discussed. Scholars are in particular invited to bring new approaches and widen the horizons of legal historians at large. Scholars willing to act as reviewers of digital projects are also invited to contact the editorial team.

Creating a journal is a sign of the willingness to create a part of the scholarly infrastructure that will help to lay sure foundations for any new discipline. It expresses also the seriousness of scholars devoting their creativity, curiosity and other scholarly qualities. Digital legal history is not a passing hype or whim. There is all reason for reflection on the digital turn and its impact on doing legal history in our days. It is up to all scholars with an active interest in digital legal history to contribute not only to this field in the ways they see fit, but also to help establishing this journal as a clear point of reference for this discipline. My best wishes for the future of the Journal for Digital Legal History (@DigiLegalHisto)!

Journeys to journals on Classical Antiquity

At the end of each year it is difficult to avoid the great range of lists of all kinds of bests, and I hardly dare to even mention them here. In 2014 the Archaeological Institute of America gave an 2015 AIA Award for Outstanding Work in Digital archaeology to Charles E. Jones and his blog The Ancient World Online (AWOL) to honour his “work on open access material relation to the ancient world, serving archaeological information to more than 1.1 million unique visitors to the site since its inception in 2009”. AWOL needs no laurels, but this praise is certainly justified. One of the latest messages at AWOL in 2015 concerns scholarly journals in open access dealing with ancient law. On December 29, 2015 Charles Jones listed eighteen online journals which specifically deal with some field of legal history in classical Antiquity, and he challenges readers to find and report more journals. A number of these journals figure here in my blog roll, and thus I was immediately interested in checking this list. At AWOL is a list with now nearly 1,600 scholarly journals available in open access for the vast territories of the ancient world. Is this selection of journals touching legal history indeed complete? This post will look at some answers to this question. Indeed I was so eager to publish it that I somehow had posted it with a wrong date, a year ahead.

The power of a list

Lists can have uncanny powers. They might seem to offer everything available or they bring the best possible selection. A good list can enhance the authority of its author, and users of such lists feel comfortable with the knowledge of such lists. Thus it can feel awkward to question a list at all for its qualities, but in my view there is just one way to find about both the positive and negative sides of a list, and that it is by checking each item. This simple approach proved to be rewarding and revealing.

The international character of the list is remarkable. In most fields within Classical Studies the number of journals with English titles is impressive, but they do not outnumber journals in other languages. However, for legal history you will find in this list just two journals with an English title, Roman Legal Tradition, published online since its start in 2002 and edited at Glasgow, and The Journal of Juristic Papyrology, published since 1946 at Warsaw. I did wonder about the presence of other relevant journals with English titles, and thus I quickly checked among the titles of the main list of journals at AWOL. Two titles seemed worthy of inclusion, the Ancient Greek Law eJournal and the Ancient Roman Law eJournal, but they turned out to be something else, a quick reference point for recent research published at SSRN, the Social Sciences Research Network. Both e-journals bring together papers to be published or already published on either Greek or Roman law in other legal journals. The two selections show how both fields currently can appear outside the province of legal history: nine publications for ancient Greek law, and five for Roman law, mainly in American law journals. A third title does not refer to a scholarly journal, but to the reports of the Hellenic Society for Law and Archaeology, where the laws in question are obviously laws touching upon cultural heritage. I cannot figure why PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review figures at all at AWOL, in particular because only few issues are available in open access. Anyway, for good reasons these three journals were not deemed fit for inclusion in the new list of journals dealing with ancient legal history.

Two German titles in the list made me very curious because they did not seem to be current journals anymore. The Jahrbücher für historische und dogmatische Bearbeitung des römischen Rechts appeared three times between 1841 and 1844. The brothers Wilhelm and Karl Sell launched their journal from Zürich and Bonn. The second journal, Themis. Zeitschrift für Doctrin und Praxis des römischen Rechts, appeared in two short series between 1828 and 1848, the first series in 1828 and 1830, the second from 1838 until 1848. This journal was the idea of Christian Friedrich Elvers from Rostock. The subtitle of the first series was Zeitschrift für praktische Rechtswissenschaft, only the second series mentioned Roman law. Elvers filled the pages of his journal in particular in the second series mainly with his own contributions. In 1841 Elvers had become a judge at Kassel, and this move probably influenced his activities for the journal. Both journals have been digitized at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main. In my view it is one of the characteristics of the study of Roman law in nineteenth-century Germany that articles and book reviews appeared not just in the journals devoted to legal history, but also in the profusion of general law journals. Such statements can be checked readily thanks to the massive digitization at Frankfurt am Main of relevant journals published between 1800 and 1918. Just for the record, I did look also at the sister project for eighteenth-century journals (Zeitschriften 1703-1830), but in this set Roman law was not used in any title. In 2011 I wrote here about digitization projects for old legal journals and also about projects for creating online access to current journals in the field of legal history.

At this point we still have sixteen journals correctly included in Jones’ list, and an implicit conclusion from the last paragraph should help me proceeding here. In a list with open access journals you expect to find journals currently appearing, and only on second thought also retrodigitized journals. Curiously, the list does include not only the Romanistische Abteilung of the Zeitschrift für Rechtsgeschichte der Savigny-Stiftung, but also the Kanonistische Abteilung, a branched launched in 1910. The online issues of these journals have been digitized at Frankfurt, too, but this is a case of digitizing old issues, as for now up to 1919. Some journals in the list at AWOL do not offer exclusively articles concerning ancient law. Forum Historiae Iuris is one of the oldest online journals for legal history. Iura Orientalia does not only cover the field of ancient Oriental law, but also modern Oriental law, in particular ecclesiastical law. In fact the section on Byzantine law of this journal reminded me of two journals published in Groningen, the Subseciva Groningana (1984-), published only in print, and the Groninger Opmerkingen en Mededelingen, a journal for which only a number of individual contributions are available online in open access.

What more should be said here about the remaining journals of the list? It is good to see two online journals for the history of Greek law, the Rivista di Diritto Hellenico, alas possibly damaged by malware at the moment of writing, and Dike. Rivista di Storia del Diritto Greco ed Hellenistico (1998-). When I saw the title of The Journal of Juristic Papyrology I could not help thinking of the ZPE, the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. You can check online for the titles of all articles since 1967, and this journal surely does contain contribution about ancient legal history. The issues 73 (1988) to 133 (2000) of the ZPE are now available in open access. I bumped into an article by Sir Ronald Syme, ‘Journeys to Hadrian’, ZPE 73 (1988) 159-170, My title is a tribute to a scholar who impressed me as a student with his compact style. I will try to follow his example here more than in previous years! The journal from Warsaw is available online at a special platform for Polish scholarly journals in the humanities, Czasopisma humanistyczne.

The Rivista di Diritto Romano does offer space for articles on diritti antichi, other ancient legal systems, too. In fact the website of this journal is almost a portal to Roman law and its afterlife with sections on the palingenesis of Roman law texts, the Basilica, a list of journals, and online versions of numerous Roman law texts. However, a major drawback is the navigation at its website where you can find only the latest issue online. The Russian journal Ius Antiquum is a further witness to the international character of Classical Studies. I leave it to you to have a look at the other journals of a list which if not exhaustive surely proved to be interesting

However, one journal must not be left out here. A few months ago I had already spotted the surprising online appearance of the third series of the very high regarded Revue internationale des droits de l’antiquité (RIDA). This journal, published by scholars at the Université de Liège, has digitized the issues XXVI (1979) to LIX (2012). The decision to publish such recent issues of a well-known. peer-reviewed international learned journal might well be a spur for other publishers to make moves in the direction of open access. The RIDA is even present at Facebook. The image of the new cover shows the new publisher, the Presses Universitaires de Liège, but on the RIDA website you can still subscribe to volumes published at Paris.

The changing world of scholarly journals

As for the 1,700 journal titles in the major overview at AWOL I am afraid a number of them is not in its entirety available in open access. One example: Brepols Online publishes the Revue d’Histoire des Textes, but only issues between 2006 and 2009 are to seen freely. Making a comparison with journals registered within the Directory of Open Journals is not as easy as one would expect today. You can search either by entering keywords in a search field for titles, forcing you to look for specific matters in a number of languages, or use the far too general subject filters. Even history or culture have not yet been deemed worthy independent subjects. At the start of a new year there are many days in which this sorry state of affairs can be changed, but anyway it will be useful to follow the posts labelled Law at AWOL – The Ancient World Online!

Creating convincing arguments in court

Lately I was gently pressed to add a particular blog to my blogroll. I argued that it does not deal primarily with legal history, although it is in many respects a most valuable blog. Even after a second plea, accompanied with a nice variant on Ceterum censeo… I still stick with my argument, but in fact this blog had already been included in my blogroll…  On closer inspection of the links now present I also looked at the growing number of online journals in open access dealing with legal history. The latest issue of Clio@Themis [8 (2014)] deals with the history of legal argumentation, a theme which has had my interest since many years. I also spotted the announcement of an upcoming scholarly event in May on this subject. Nomôdos, the blog of Clio@Themis, is most useful in tracing new publications and announcements concerning legal history in France. Thus it is a source for my congress calendar, and of course it is listed in my blogroll. These two subjects give me enough materials for this post.

Arguments in courts

Clio@Themis is a French scientific journal with most of its articles in French, with abstracts in English added to them. The journal has a tradition of including as a bonus a French version of classic legal articles. Its latest issue called L’argumentation au cœur du processus judiciaire skips this feature. Seven articles deal with legal argumentation in court proceedings. Two other contributions are only loosely connected with the general subject of this issue.

Catherine Denys and Naoko Seriu introduce the theme of this number and elucidate briefly the subjects of the seven articles which originated at three days of scholarly encounters around this theme in 2012 at the Centre d’Histoire Judiciaire (Université Lille-2). They describe a shift from viewing legal argumentation solely as part of legal doctrine to an approach akin to the way philosophers, sociologists and linguists deal with speech acts. The history of the judiciary and legal practice is here the primary field of investigation. The use of arguments is seen here as a part of a strategy to get favorable results in court.

The focus of all articles is on three European countries during the Early Modern period, with the exception of two articles dealing with subjects from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the first two articles the sixteenth century comes into light. Alain Wijffels discusses procedures claiming revisions of earlier trials at the Grand Conseil de Malines, the highest court of the Habsburgian Low Countries. The appeals for revision should be allowed in cases of factual errors (error facti) and in principle not for any legal error (error iuris), but in actual practice both kinds or error could be redeemed. The interesting thing is how lawyers at Malines argued about this state of affairs.

Marco Cavina deals in his contribution – in Italian – with the views of Carlo Ruini and Andrea Alciato concerning the different types of legal counseling in consilia. Alciato sketched a model with different approaches used by lawyers. Some went for subtle reasonings (subtilitates), others for the archetypical Renaissance – but essential medieval – abundance (copia) of allegations from Roman and canon law, and a third group imitated the brevitas of the classical Roman lawyers and their compact way of expressing opinions. Alciato frowned upon publishing consilia for several reasons, but his own contributions to this genre, too, were posthumously printed.

Isabelle Arnal-Corthier looks at materials sometimes presented to the Parlement de Toulouse in criminal appeal cases between 1670 and 1700. Instead of just a hearing of the accused for an appeal in criminal cases as punctuated in the royal ordinance of 1670 barristers often brought also a lettre de cassation to this court. The defense adduced in these cases mainly arguments about the competence of lower courts, insufficient evidence or irregularities during judicial procedures.

Yet another French court, the Parlement de Tournai and its third chamber in the late seventeenth century, figures in an article by Jacques Lorgnier who deals with cases concerning property rights and conflicts about the cost of church repairs. This foray into actual argumentation leads him to the hypothesis that the justiciables, the people going to court and their legal representatives, trusted the workings of rational arguments in the face of solid proofs within the framework of legal procedure.

At this point I would like to mention the great resource created by legal historians at Lille for doing research into the history of the Parlement de Flandre. In the database ParleFlandre you can find more than 30,000 dossiers from the série 8B1 at the Archives Départementales du Nord (ADN) in Lille. Lorgnier uses cases from another series of dossiers at the ADN, the série 8B2. For the history of the Low Countries the archival collections at the ADN contain many important documents. At Fontes Historiae Iuris, the virtual portal at Lille to digitized resources concerning French legal history, is a section with further resources for the Parlement de Flandre.

Naoko Seriu looks at a scarcely known crime at the end of the Ancien Régime, the illegal sale of military goods by deserters, in particular uniforms. Records of trials survive in which individuals were charged with buying these illegal uniforms or the vendors themselves were charged with this crime. Seriu compares the verbal strategies used and the particular differences in approach to exculpate themselves. I could not help noticing that the examples of cases stem mainly from Brittany, in fact from just one modern département, Ille-et-Vilaine. A comparison with other regions might be useful. At the EHESS in Paris Seriu studied with Arlette Farge, a French historian who has devoted much attention to the way stories are told in historical sources, recently in Condamnés au XVIIIe siècle (Lormont 2013).

Forays into the twentieth century

Bruno Debaenst (Ghent) brings us from France to Belgium and much closer to the twentieth-first century. In his contribution (in English) he has studied trials concerning accidents during work in around Mons between 1870 and 1914. Using dangerous machinery, imperfectly prepared surroundings, shortcomings in labor organization, and workmanship not up to demands were among the arguments heard around these cases. In these years the Belgian code of civil law still was a virtually unchanged version of the French Code civil, with scarcely attention to actual circumstances in an industrial society. Debaenst describes also the use of reports by experts, criminal investigations and testimonies. In the face of inadequate means to deal conclusively with liability defendants had much opportunity to evade responsibility for what happened in their firms, thus reaffirming the gap between workers and patrons.

In the last article of this special Frédéric Chavaud brings us to familiar scenes from modern crime series on television. He looks at the use of emotions between 1880 and 1940 as arguments at the Cour des Assises, the highest criminal court in French departments. Tears, laughter and fear were not only used by barristers and defendants, but also by others in court. Studying the history of emotions is not without its pitfalls, and Chavaud rightfully points to some pivotal studies. He uses mainly contemporary public reports about trials, and not the actual dossiers of the cases. These reports do convey a vivid image or proceedings, but one can suspect that their authors also follow well-known tracks to please the expectations of their readers. Of course it is exactly important to notice such bias and detect changes in them. Emotions can and could break rational arguments and reasonings, specially when directed at juries. Chavaud clearly focuses on the contemporary perception of emotions, and he rightly mentions studies about emotions in court published between 1920 and 1940.

The range in time of this special is pleasing, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and we read about both civil and criminal law. The geographic focus, however, is on France, even when admittedly you get a most varied view of French legal history. Luckily the Low Countries, Belgium and Italy add a European dimension. Lorgnier is the only author to mention the use of topical argumentation. I am afraid it is not quite possible to expand here very much on any of the articles presented here. You can always wish for more, and therefore I invite you now to the second section of this post about a congress where you might pursue this aim very soon.

Studying legal controversies

La controverse. Études de l’histoire d’argumentation juridique [Controversy. Studies on the history of legal argumentation] is the title of the coming Journées internationales, the yearly congress organized by the Société d’Histoire du Droit. This year’s congress will be held at Rennes from May 28 to 31, 2015 with the Centre d’Histoire du Droit of the Université de Rennes-1 acting as its hosts. You might want to have a good look at the generous links section of their website and at its own digital library. Rennes is the capital of the département Ille-et-Vilaine mentioned above, and participants might want to visit the Archives départementales. The call for papers is still active. Proposals should be sent before March 10, 2015, and this is the closing date, too, for registration (mail: shd.rennes@gmail.com). Rennes is well worth visiting, in particular for the building of the old Parlement de Bretagne. Saint-Malo and the Mont-Saint-Michel are not far away.

Young scholars, too, get a chance at Rennes. There will be a atélier doctoral organized in cooperation with the Association française des jeunes historiens du droit, a society of young legal historians founded in 2013. You can send your proposals until March 30, 2015 (mail: assofjhd@gmail.com).

The congress wants to approach controversies both as a phenomenon within the territories of law, be it the judiciary, legislation or doctrine, and as historical cases of conflicts about a plethora of possible subjects. What was the impact of certain schools of thought? Which impact had other disciplines on legal theory and practice? It is perhaps necessary to keep in thought that the international dimension of the Journées was and is traditional that of the French-speaking world at large, the francophonie. The blog like website at Rennes nicely mentions the exceptional use of English for any communication. In a region with many British and Dutch visitors one might expect the start of a change to that tradition.

This post with a French flavor should also remind readers from the Anglophone world that those speaking and writing English are not the only possible center of the world of science. It can be truly useful and illuminating to know about different approaches in other countries, to practice them yourself or to use your approach on foreign ground in order to see how universal it really is. Anyway, I have tried to convey something of my joy in discovering this special of an online legal history journal, and I might well do this here again. In my blogroll or for example at Nomôdos or the blog of the European Society for Comparative Legal History you can choose from many online journals in the fields of legal history.

Revisiting Frankfurt am Main

One of the earliest posts on my blog in 2009 was devoted to the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt has featured here in many posts, for example in a post on a guided tour to the criminal history of the capital of Rheinland-Hessen and in the post on Savigny at 150 years. Many times I have referred here to the pivotal position of this German research institute in the field of legal history, because it is the best example of an institute showing the variety of legal history, which almost leads you to prefer the plural expression legal histories. When I visited this week the website of the Frankfurt institute I found many new things which merit attention in a new post. The new building of the institute in Frankfurt’s West End gets close to completion, but it is really worthwhile to have a look at its activities before the move from the Hausener Weg to the new location near the inner city.

From strength to strength

At the moment I wrote the caption for this paragraph I wondered whether the MPI at Frankfurt am Main has indeed a motto of its own, but this one could very well play this role! In the face of many other fields of science and law for which the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft has created institutes it is most reassuring that legal history, too, has got its place since many years. The research programs of the MPG’s institutes are comparable to any other research institute, but the main goals and aims are reviewed by the central board in Munich through the years, with as a possible consequence closure or radical change.

One of the changes has been a shift of focus from private law to other legal disciplines, and from the European Middle Ages to other periods and regions. Countries in the South-East of Europe and Latin America are new targets of research. Luckily materials brought together at the MPI such as a large collection of microfilms of medieval manuscripts are still safely in place. Quite recently the history of the former Arbeitsgruppe Legistik has been honoured with the launch of a digital version of the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600 (4 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1972) in the database Manuscripta Juridica. The original edition itself was basically a print made by Gero Dolezalek and Hans van de Wouw with their pioneering computer program of information concerning manuscripts in libraries worldwide containing texts of and commentaries on Roman law. The online version will be supplemented with data concerning manuscripts with canon law texts. Recht im ersten Jahrtausend is a new subseries of the MPI in the main series Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte. The recent publication of Andreas Thier’s study Hierarchie und Autonomie. Regelungstraditionen der Bischofsbestellung in der Geschichte des kirchlichen Wahlrechts bis 1140 (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), on episcopal elections and medieval ecclesiastical law, shows that early European legal history is not neglected.

The library of the Frankfurt MPI is really the core and the heart of the institute. Its digital library testifies to its rich holdings by steady enlargements. To the first section with digitized German law journals between 1800 and 1918 a second section has been added this year with journals between 1703 and 1830. At present you can view 31 journals, some two hundred (!) more will be added. You will not wonder that these projects dominate the field of legal history until now, and they have a special place in an earlier post on digitized journals and legal history.

The Virtueller Raum Reichsrecht is dedicated to digitized works stemming from the German Holy Roman Empire. A much larger collection is DRQEdit with digital editions of German-language legal works, a project in cooperation with the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg and the University of Cologne. Legal literature from Germany, Switzerland and Austria concerning private law printed during the nineteenth century is another subject for a separate digital library, with more than 4,000 books. The digital library for dissertations from the Holy Roman Empire between 1600 and 1800 contains a number of digitized versions of them, but is mainly concerned with presenting a detailed description of some 73,000 dissertations. By now it should be no surprise the institute at Frankfurt participates with three other institutes of the MPG in the Digitization Lifecycle project for best practices and innovation in the field of digitization. It is only fair to indicate that for reasons of copyright the number of accessible digitized books in the field of Byzantine law is unfortunately very restricted. The overview of manuscripts with legal texts from Byzantium offers here some solace. By the way, a number of pages of the MPI website are available both in German and English.

The holdings of the library have been enriched by the collections of several scholars in the field of legal history. Among recent accessions is the library of Sten Gagnér (1921-2000) with 10,000 volumes and many offerings. It goes without mention the library offers to its visitors access to a number of subscribed databases and the MPG’s own digital library and licensed online journals. It is often very sensible to look for books on a particular subject first in the library catalogue of the MPI. This will bring you often to literature you had not yet spotted at all. The only sections recently removed from the website of the MPI – or hopefully just temporarily missing – are the links section and the selection of portals for legal history.

In June 2012 the Max Planck Legal Studies Network has been launched in which ten legal institutes combine forces. One of the strengths of the Frankfurt MPI has always been the support of young scholars. With the University of Frankfurt the MPI cooperates in a Graduiertenkolleg, a graduate school for comparative legal history. Every year the MPI organizes a summer school and several other courses for young scholars. The Graduiertenschule Lateinamerika is organized in cooperation with institutions in Argentina and Brazil. For reasons of space I skip other initiatives for young scholars, apart from the financial support for graduates. A link with contemporary law is provided by the new LOEWE center of excellence Aussergerichtliche und gerichtliche Konfliktlösung, a three-year project extrajudicial and judicial conflict solution, a theme dear to my Rotterdam supervisor Chris ten Raa who organized already in the nineties an international research project on the history of mediation and conciliation.

The journal Rg-Rechtsgeschichte scarcely needs introduction as the successor to Ius Commune (1967-2001) which is in its entirety accessible online in the PDF format, and also to the Rechtshistorisches Journal with an often amusing different slant on and sometimes scathing view of the practice of legal history. It is a relief drawings are again admitted to the pages of Rg-Rechtsgeschichte!

More institutions in Frankfurt

The Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main, the location of the Nationalversammlung in 1848

I would like to end this post with a brief look at institutions of the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. The law faculty at Frankfurt is certainly not negligible, and in particular not the Institut für Rechtsgeschichte. The university library, too, is worth visiting. 1848-Flugschriften im Netz is the digital collection with pamphlets on the German revolution of 1848. Compact Memory is a project with over 100 digitized 19th and 20th century Jewish journals from Germany, to mention only one of the digital collections concerning Jewish history and heritage. Legal texts are present among the more than 400 digitized medieval manuscripts. I pick at random from the special collections the Internet Library Subsaharan Africa, a major portal for African studies, the Flugschriftensammlung Gustav Freytag and the Sammlung Deutscher Drucke 1801-1870, the central collection of German imprints from this period. Colonial history is the focus of the Bildarchiv, the digital image collection of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, digitized in cooperation with the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft, Dresden. The university library holds also the former collection of the Bibliothek der Bundesversammlung (1816-1866). The volumes of the inventory by Johann Conradin Beyerbach of Frankfurt city ordinances, Sammlung der Verordnungen der Reichsstadt Frankfurt (11 vol., Frankfurt am Main 1798-1818), have been digitized, and the university library has several thousands of these ordinances.

Let’s finish with four other institutions: the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek with for example the German Exilarchiv 1933-1945, focuses on bibliographical projects and communication. The museums in Frankfurt have created the society for Frankfurter Museumsbibliotheken. For legal history the Institut für Stadtgeschichte, too, is one of the libraries with relevant holdings. The history of criminals and punishments comes into view at the Kriminalmuseum Frankfurt am Main.

You might think I forget to mention scholars doing research and teaching in Frankfurt. I am very well aware they make the MPI and the other institutions briefly touched upon here into places with a vibrant scholarly life. Many of these scholars do deserve laurels. The very least to do is pointing to two deceased scholars, Helmut Coing, the founder of the Frankfurt MPI for European Legal History, and Marie-Theres Fögen, also many years at the head of this institute. In my experience the scholars in the service of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte do their best to honour their memory. All who visit the institute and benefit from its services should follow and debate the standards they set, for constructive debate about the fundamental questions, practices and prejudices of legal history is also among the inheritance they left to future generations.

Rivista di Diritto Ellenico, a new e-journal for ancient Greek law

A few days ago the French legal history blog Nomôdos, the twin sister of the e-journal Clio@Themis, announced the first issue of the Rivista di Diritto Ellenico, a journal devoted to the study of ancient Greek law.

This new journal is edited by scholars at Torino, Isernia and Verona. The Rivista di Diritto Ellenico is published in open access, but there is a connection with the publishing firm Edizioni dell’Orso in Alessandria. The first issue of the Rivista di Diritto Ellenico contains eleven articles and seven book reviews. The translation in Italian of an article from 1963 by Hans-Julius Wolff, ‘Verjährung von Ansprüchen nach Attischen Recht’, is a service which could very well be inspired by the translation into French of classic articles in each issue of Clio@Themis. All contributions in the first issue are in Italian. However, the editors invite authors to submit articles in Italian, English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish and modern Greek. You can send email to the editors at this address.

In the section Rara et dissertationes you will find digitized versions of articles and theses which are difficult to trace; at this moment you will find just two items. The Foglio Giusgrecistico is the news bulletin of the review, with announcements of conferences and details on the contents of new publications. The section Collana announces the republication of Diritto greco antico by Arnaldo Biscardi (Milano 1982). In the links section you can download either as a PDF or as a text document a useful commented list of links for the study of ancient Greek law.

The creation of a new platform for scholars working in the field of legal history is an enterprise for which the founders need great courage, stamina and discernment. The choice for an e-journal in open access seems a promising one. Let’s hope the editors and all people involved with the Rivista di Diritto Ellenico succeed in making this new e-journal a success!

A new journal about legal history: Historia et Ius

A few months ago I included the Italian portal Storia del diritto medievale e moderno in my comparison of independent portals for legal history. This Italian portal was launched earlier this year, at the same as the new Dutch portal Rechtsgeschiedenis.org. In fact I even announced the launch of both sites in a post.

This weekend the team behind the Italian site led by Paolo Alvazzi del Frate (Università Roma Tre) sent a message with a call for papers for a new e-journal, Historia et Ius. The new journal is integrated with the portal site: behind the button “Rivista” you will find Historia et Ius. The redaction invites in the call for papers – thoughtfully provided in Italian, French and English – authors to submit their contributions for the first issue due to be published on July 1, 2012 before February 29, 2012. Articles may be written in Italian, French, English, German or Spanish.

The quality of this new journal will not only depend on the weight of the board of editors and reviewers, but surely first and foremost on the quality of the contributions to be published. You can submit your papers to the e-mail address info@historiaetius.eu. Tanti auguri per Historia et Ius!

Pathways to old legal journals

Last week’s post about the digitization of old legal journals cries out for a sequel. In fact I had already some information ready to add, and since this asks for more space than just a postscript I have decided to create this short rejoinder.

The German legal journals of the nineteenth century came into existence in a society where many learned journals already existed. Some websites have been created to chart the history of such journals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The Index Deutschsprachiger Zeitschriften 1750-1815 at the Universität Göttingen is one of the pathways offering bibliographical access to them. In my earlier post I have mentioned the projects at Bielefeld and Berlin. At the Universität Wuppertal the Repertorium deutscher wissenschaftlicher Periodika des 18. Jahrhunderts performs similar services for the reviews of scientific works in the eighteenth century in the acts of learned societies, the Acta Eruditorum and the Nova Acta Eruditorum, and for the first scientific journals devoted to one discipline. This website offers also a short but very useful link selection to digitized journals from the eighteenth century in other European countries, such as the Philosophical Transactions and the Journal des Savants.

It seems useful to mention here some websites which present nineteenth-century journals. Only a few of them are dedicated exclusively to legal history, but they certainly contain articles of interest for legal historians, depending on their research themes and predilections. Welsh Journals Online is an initiative of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. On a server of the Bodleian Library you can find the Internet Library of Early Journals, six digitized English journals from a project in cooperation with other universities. The Royal Dutch Institute for South East Asian and Caribbean Studies has digitized three journals, in particular the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (founded in 1853) which focuses on the ethnology of Indonesia, and the Nieuwe West-Indische Gids (New West Indian Review) (founded 1919).

Knowing about journals and tracking their contents is of course not only important for research on Early Modern Europe, but also for modern history and the present. First of all I would like to mention the Zeitschriftenfreihandmagazin created by Stuart Jenks. These “Magazine Stacks”, now at Fordham University, are an invaluable tool to search for articles in historical journals past and present, Some websites are very helpful to find out about the scientific and legal journals in a particular country. The Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Recht, a service of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz, offers among its many qualities a database for searching in legal journals. The Swiss National Library in Bern has created the Schweizerisches Zeitschriftenportal with a database for searching in Swiss scientific journals. Tidsskrift.dk is a Danish website with nine digitized journals, and links to ten other digitized journals. The German history portal Clio Online brings you not only a very rich choice of websites, but also research guides for the history of a number of countries, which often mention electronic journals.

Anyone wishing to find out about American law journals should visit the website of an American law school. They almost always mention the main subscribers’ only services, including access to the well-known databases for legal journals. More amazing is the fact that some American law schools do not mention a library on their websites! The law faculty of the Universität Hannover has got a useful list of open access law journals, and a similar list is provided at Cambridge. If you like to know in advance about current scholarship visiting the e-repositories of universities is the road to choose. A number of these repositories at law schools in the North East of the United States can be searched using a meta-catalogue.

Let me finish with repeating my opinion that I have probably missed some interesting journals. You are welcome to add information about them. And let me repeat also that I refrain from pointing to paid databases. If you have connections to a university or if you are a card holder of a national library you will probably have access to them thanks to the services of these institutions. From what I have gathered here and on my website you can discover lots of things outside this range.

Open the gates! Digitized journals on legal history

Talking and writing about digital libraries can be hampered by very different views about the making, form and contents of a digital library. Nowadays we take a digitized catalogue for granted, and almost every library has a website with online access to its catalogue, sometimes even to several catalogues. Some digital libraries define themselves by the variety of social media which they use. Tweets and blog posts, presence on social networks, and even link collections on a separate site are among the possible forms of virtual presence. Law libraries have joined these activities, too. For the interest of visitors of my blog I have brought together a number of blogs by the departments for rare books or special collections of some libraries with important holdings for legal history.

I have often expressed my objective to track as many as possible digital libraries with content in the field of legal history, meaning digitized versions of books and other resources of a library. Law libraries themselves have to face multiple tasks and multiple forms of digitization, and let’s not forget the variety of presentation offered by the vendors of digital library programs. A law library typically offers a number of so-called e-resources, with primarily the major subscribers’ only databases with access to recent jurisprudence, sometimes also similar databases for historical books, an e-repository for the publications of the staff of the law school or law faculty to which they belong, and online access to legal journals, this also often using subscriptions by the library. Very often all these resources can be used also off campus. Law libraries face heavy expenses maintaining the number of journals on paper, but maintaining online access to them, too, is not cheap. Some law libraries offer a number of web guides, too, sometimes in great detail and on many subjects. Creating online exhibitions is also one of the ways of giving digitization its wide scope.  Depending on awareness of user accessibility and user friendliness, the possibilities of a given system, the funding available and the scope and range of a law library it can be clearly indicated which parts are open to all and sundry, which ones can be used only inside the library and which also at home, sometimes even through a special law portal. Those libraries marking the accessibility of their resources or simply briefly describing them instead of only listing them deserve credit for the time and trouble taken to help the visitors of their websites.

How about digital access to journals for legal history? The variety of presentation is daunting , both for the number of back issues accessible and for the wide range of their vicinity to the present. Some journals of venerable standing and a rich tradition are only offered in open access for a very limited number of years, and often only the nineteenth century issues. Other journals with a similar long history can be accessed freely thanks to the legal situation surrounding a journal: if a research institute published itself a journal less copyright issues can be expected to occur. More fundamental is the fact that articles touching legal history are not only published in the major legal history reviews but also elsewhere. It will not do to use only the mainstream journals, but you often have to get hold of a journal which you normally would not read at all.

Legal journals have flourished particularly in Germany. A very welcome selection of them has been digitized at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main. The first section is concerned with journals between 1900 and 1918, a project for a second section awaited for eagerly aims at the period 1703-1830 and will hopefully be launched in 2013  in cooperation with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussische Kulturbesitz. There is more to be found in Germany. Klaus Graf has created a very useful list of websites for digitized scientific journals, one of the most often read posts on his Archivalia blog. The German Wikisource website mentioned by Graf provides a list of digitized legal journals, and similar lists of journals for other disciplines, for example for history. On the list of digitized legal journals you will find apart from the Max-Planck-Institut – which easily dominates this list – mainly a collection at the Universität Bielefeld, a project in which 160 journals from the period of the German Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and other relevant periodicals have been digitized, and digitized journals at the Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung of the Deutsches Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung in Berlin. The general German project for the digitization of old scientific journals, DigiZeitschriften, offers only a limited number of issues in open access. Here the bulk of the journals can be accessed only at subscribing libraries or by the cardholders of such libraries. In view of the sheer number of German journals it is clear digitization is expensive, but is it not clear, too, that the phenomenon of German scientific journals dominated science during the nineteenth century, and that therefore conservation and access are important both for historians of science and for those pursuing disciplines building also on accumulated information? One has only to look at the number and variety of Jewish journals from Germany digitized at the Compact Memory website to envisage the role of journals in German society at large.

One of the main gateways to digital journals in open access is offered by Lund University Libraries, the well-known Directory of Open Access Journals. Perhaps less well-known is JURN, a searchable repository for some 4,000 journals. The accompanying blog offers guidance, lots of links to similar initiatives and relevant blogs, and a general guide to free academic search. By the way, OpenDoar, the Directory of Open Access Repositories at the University of Nottingham, is not the only website where you can look for such repositories, but certainly a very useful one. The university library at Regensburg offers an electronic journal library for both open and limited access journals with an interface iu German, English and French. The World Legal Institute has on its website an International Legal Scholarship Library with access to some forty legal journals.

Some countries have decided to create national repositories for the production of scientific journals. SEALS is a Swiss project which has started only recently. Persée is a project for digitizing not only older, but also more recent issues of scientific journals. Revues.org is a French organization offering online access to nearly 300 current scientific journals, with a substantial number of them containing articles not only in French. Some nineteenth-century journals and parliamentary documents in the field of French criminal law are available online through the services of Criminocorpus. Digitized scientific journals can appear in more general collections as well. The Digital Library of Dutch Literature is planning to digitize a number of journals which touch upon the history of Dutch literature, and not only journals dedicated exclusively to Dutch literature.

Legal history with a Dutch view is the subtitle of my blog, and maybe it is appropriate to mention it when pointing to the websites of the International Institute for Social History and of Aletta, formerly the International Study Center for Women’s History, both in Amsterdam. Women’s history is a new subject for this blog, and although I feel ashamed I have not touched this subject before, I am happy it shows up here finally. Aletta has a fine selection of digital scientific journals on women’s history. The IISH has an equally useful selection of weblinks, foremost among them the Virtual Library Women’s History maintained at the IISH, and ViVa Women’s History, an online current bibliography of women’s and gender history. There’s more than only the Women’s Legal History website of Stanford Law School, the great Women’s Legal Biography Project at Stanford, and the IntLawGrrls blog, but today journals are my chosen subject… Surely more lists of a similar kind exist. To round-up the Dutch corner of this post a reference to a journal on Dutch history: the Royal Dutch Historical Society has digitized the years 1970 to 2010 of the Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden – Low Countries History Yearbook.

Doing legal history can among other things boil down to have to consult sometimes a very great variety of scientific journals. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of ancient history. The presence of a list of digitized scientific journals touching on the whole range of ancient history, from Sumeria to the Roman Empire, including the various auxiliary disciplines – epigraphy, papyrology and much more – is a witness to the proliferation of journals, more than 900 of them available to some extent or completely in a digitized form. Charles Ellwood Jones maintains this list at his blog Ancient World Online. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, the institution where he works, has also a Facebook page for Ancient Studies with useful announcements of new digital services, such as online bibliographies. A few months ago I wrote about digital papyrology in a post concerning the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and a month ago sources in cuneiform script presented in new ways figured in another post. It can offer you food for thought how scholars doing ancient history seem to embrace modern tools more and more and often to their great benefit. As for now, it seemed useful to bring the rather scattered information on digitized journals relevant to legal history together, but I am sure more is to be found. Additions to this overview are most welcome!

A first postscript

Klaus Graf rightly points to the digitized issues of Ius Commune, the journal published between 1967 and 2001 by the MPI for European Legal History. Some articles of the journal Rechtsgeschichte founded in 2002 can be consulted online, too. It is true this post deals with two kinds of digitized journals, both older journals no longer appearing and more specific early legal journals, and with digital versions of currently appearing journals, some of them available as web-only journals – the e-journal in its purest form -, others presenting online more or less completely back issues of the paper version. There is certainly a need to distinguish between them, but all these varieties are important, either as research objects or as resources for research.