VUB Contextual Research in Law

  (image source: Belgian State Archives, all rights reserved) This event is a presentation of 175 pages of  manuscript course notes on the law of nations  ( Le droit des gens ) linked to a  course taught at the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Belle Époque , retrieved in Louis (Léon) Arendt's private papers in the Belgian State Archives (Fund BE-A0510.320). The inventory can be consulted on the State Archives'  website . Edouard Louis Léon Marie Arendt (1843-1924) was the director-general of political affairs (1886) in the Belgian Foreign Office in the heyday of King Leopold II's reign. He entered the Ministry as 'attaché' in 1870. Belgium's security on the European continent, and of course the affairs of the Congo Free State were the dominant themes of his time in office as a civil servant (1870-1912). Biographical details can be found in the entry by Jacques Willequet in the  Biographie nationale de Belgique . His father,  Academy memb...

(Source:  Image source: Zealand by Isaac Tirion (1747),  Wikimedia Commons ) Stefano Cattelan , Marco in ’t Veld and Niels Fieremans  will present at the   Journées internationales d’histoire du droit et des institutions: l’art et le droit   in Middelburg on 28 May 2022. More information on the event  here .

While still somewhat niche, digital humanities (history) and empirical legal studies (law) have successfully established themselves as respectable fields of research. Yet, both Belgian law schools nor legal historians have picked up this trend. In this lecture, I explain how legal historical methods have evolved over the past decades and provide examples of how empirical methods may be applied in legal (historical) research. Although the concerns of lawyers are somewhat different  from legal historians, empirical or digital methods can be beneficial to both. The lecture is thus relevant for all researchers interested in empirical and digital methods. Florenz Volkaert   (°1995) studied law at Ghent University (2018, summa cum laude) and obtained an LL.M/MSc. in Law and Economics (2018-2019, receiving the award for best student in the program) from the Universität Hamburg, Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research as part of an Erasmus...

The ACCA team of the Faculty of Law and Criminology of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) would like to invite you to the eleventh edition of the Assistentenconferentie/Conférence des assistant.es (ACCA 2022). The theme of the conference will be “Shaping Utopia Through Law – How the law does (not) provide an answer to societal challenges”. There are many issues facing society now, ranging from health, democracy, equal rights, migration, peace and citizen participation to climate, sustainability, digitisation, and innovation. These challenges make us long for the idea of anideal society, a “utopia”; an image that was put forward by, among others, Thomas More.  With its slogan “The world needs you” the VUB encourages everyone to contribute to an “ideal society”. Lawyers and criminologists undoubtedly play a central role therein, although this role raises various (research) questions. For example, what answers can legal studies and the criminological sciences provide to the aforemen...

Prof. Frederik Dhondt bekleedt op uitnodiging van   collega proxima  Prof. Hylkje De Jong aan de Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam de wisselleerstoel 2020-2021 van de Stichting tot Uitgaef der Bronnen van het Oudvaderlands Recht. In het kader van deze   leerstoel , die een reeks aan colleges en lezingen omvat, wordt een   publiek inauguraal college met receptie voorzien   op woensdag 18 mei.   U vindt nadere details in de PDF in bijlage.

Prof. Frederik Dhondt reviewed Jennifer Pitts,   Boundaries of the International   ( Harvard University Press , 2018) for the journal   Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales . More information here: DOI 10.1017/ahss.2022.27 (image source: Cambridge )