VUB Contextual Research in Law

(image source: Firenze University Press) Prof. Dave De ruysscher contributed to the roundtable “Risk, Uncertainty and Bankruptcy before Modernity: Language, Experience and Historical Understanding”, published in the collective volume Gestione del rischio, insolvenza e bancarotta nel mondo premoderno (secc. XIII-XVIII) / Risk Management, Insolvency, and Bankruptcy in the Pre-Modern World (13th-18th Centuries) , edited by Angela Orlandi.  Read the contribution here in open access: DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.32.

(image source: MPILHLT ) Prof. Dave De ruysscher published an article on "The Bill of Exchange and the Dynamics of Legal Interpretation (15th–18th Centuries)" Abstract: This article analyses the developments of the law of bills of exchange in the later Middle Ages and early modern period from the vantage point of »legal dynamics«. From the 14th century onwards, the bill of exchange developed in interactions between international mercantile practice, legislative approaches and juristic interpretation. Close attention to mercantile documents and sources of practice allows us to nuance a largely »monolithic« image of the emergence of bills of exchange and their corresponding norms. For a long time, financial instruments have been presented as mere functional creations, derived from mercantile practice. This presentation went together with an assumption of continuity. With regard to bills of exchange, this resulted in the identification of the late medieval varieties with the st...

(image source: Firenze University Press) Prof. Dave De ruysscher contributed a chapter on the emergence of a municipal legal culture of insolvency in the Low Countries to the collective volume Gestione del rischio, insolvenza e bancarotta nel mondo premoderno (secc. XIII-XVIII) / Risk Management, Insolvency, and Bankruptcy in the Pre-Modern World (13th-18th Centuries) , edited by Angela Orlandi.  Read the chapter here in open access: DOI 10.36253/979-12-215-0963-2.09.

(image source: UGent ) Prof. Frederik Dhondt contributed an article on rights and freedoms in the Weimar Constitution to the Tijdschrift voor Mensenrechten . Read the article here in open access: DOI 10.21825/tvmr.96283 .

  (image source: openaire ) Prof. Frederik Dhondt published the dataset "Goswin Arnould de Wynants' Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs Bas (Vienna, 1730)" on Zenodo. Description: Transcription (generated with Transkribus, manually corrected and tagged) of an undated copy of Goswin Arnould de Wynants' Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs Bas, initially written in Vienna in 1730 (239 images). Wynants was a member (since 1717) of the High Council for the Austrian Netherlands, an advisory organ to Emperor Charles VI (1711-1740). Trained as a lawyer in Leuven, he had been an attorney and councillor (judge) at the Council of Brabant before. Wynants describes the institutional and constitutional, but also commercial and judicial organisation of the provinces of the Spanish (from 1713 on, Austrian) Netherlands, from the late Middle Ages on. The work is written in an in...

  (image source: KCOWV/CRALO ) Prof. Dave De ruysscher and prof. Frederik Dhondt contributed to vol. LIX of the Handelingen/Bulletin  of the Royal Commission for the Publication of Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium (ISBN 9782960272451). The fulltext of their contributions can be read in open access on rechtsreeks.be .

  (image source: oldbelgianlaw ) Our former voluntary associate dr. Brecht Deseure published a precious volume in 2020, containing drafts and proposals for the Belgian Constitution of 1831 with the Royal Commission for the Publication of Old Laws and Ordinances of Belgium. This work is now available in open access. More information here .

(image source: ESIL ) Dr. Stefano Cattelan contributed to the ESIL Proceedings  volume on  Technological change and international law: pre-conference workshops of the ESIL interest groups, ESIL annual conference, Vilnius, 4 September 2024  (pp. 34-40). Read more here  (open access).

  Prof. Frederik Dhondt published an entry in the Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law  in 2021 on the 1464 draft treaty of pacification proposed by Georg of Podebrad, King of Hungary.  Due to the move of the whole Max Planck Encyclopedias of International Law  to open access, the final version can at present be consulted by all with Oxford University Press. Abstract: The ‘Treaty on the Establishment of Peace Throughout Christendom’ is a draft treaty proposed in 1463 and 1464 by king George of Poděbrad of Bohemia (1420-1471) to the Kings of Hungary, Poland and France, as well as to the Republic of Venice. Formulated as a plan for a crusade against the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (1432-1481), who had taken Constantinople in 1453, the text foresees the creation of an international organisation comprising all European sovereigns, in equal ‘universal fraternity’. The use of force between members of this new organisation would be strictly forbidden. A pa...

(image source: Spanish Ministry of Justice ) Abstract: En la década de 1920, la historia jurídica en Bélgica y los Países Bajos experimentó cambios relacionados con los planes de estudio de las universidades y la disciplina científica. Hay buenas razones para tratar a ambos países de forma combinada. De hecho, las historias jurídicas de Bélgica y los Países Bajos comparten muchas características. Ambos países habían sido uno solo hasta finales del siglo XVI. En 1648, las fronteras entre los Países Bajos septentrionales y meridionales se fijaron definitivamente en la Paz de Münster. También a partir de entonces se mantuvieron muchos rasgos comunes en las instituciones y los sistemas jurídicos de ambos países. Tanto en la República Neerlandesa como en el Sur estuvo vigente una mezcla de derecho local, estatutos y ius commune hasta la era de las codificaciones. A principios del siglo XIX, ambos países se dotaron de códigos franceses. En el Reino Unido, cuando el Norte y el Sur eran uno so...

  (image source: openedition ) Joint PhD-candidate Antoine Leclère (ULiège/FNRS-VUB) published an article in the peer reviewed open access journal Bulletin du Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles. Abstract: The imperial and ecclesiastical Principality of Liège, a state at the crossroads of European influences, was a central player in French and Austrian policy in the region roughly corresponding to present-day Belgium. During the reign of the Francophile prince-bishop François-Charles de Velbrück (1772-1784), the Principality turned towards France and entered into a series of economic, military and territorial negotiations. Faced with the scale of the task, the prince-bishop successively sent two diplomats to Versailles to maintain a direct channel with the French government, much to the regret of the Viennese court. This rapprochement continued under the reign of his successor, despite Vergennes’s reluctance to see a new diplomat from Liège installed at court. Based on the...

(image source: UGent )   dr. Kaat Cappelle (voluntary collaborator) and prof. Klaas Van Gelder (VUB-HOST/State Archives) published an article in open access. Abstract: In the 1990s, the team around Karl Härter and Michael Stolleis at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (today: the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) developed a four-tier taxonomy to tag police ordinances in the Holy Roman Empire. This taxonomy contained some 1,200 keywords, divided into 5 societal sectors, 25 regulatory areas, and c. 200 police matters. The goal of this taxonomy was to enable comparative, interterritorial research. In our present research, we took this taxonomy, designed for princely legislation and ordinances promulgated in imperial towns, and applied it to a corpus of 109 medieval and early modern police regulations stemming from manors in the county of Flanders. These regulations are compilations of legal provisions on all aspects of daily life in rural comm...

  The Library of the Faculty of Law and Criminological Sciences at KU Leuven has undertaken the digitization of the Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin pour l’Histoire Comparative des Institutions in open access. This significant collection of legal history owes a lot to the activity of its secretary-general (and ULB/VUB professor of legal history) Prof. John Gilissen (1969-1987), who authored several comprehensive synthesis reports. Consult all volumes   here .

  (image source: DeGruyter ) Our guest lecturer dr. Raphaël Cahen published a monograph in 2017 on Friedrich Gentz, secretary of the Congress of Vienna, with DeGruyter in the series Pariser Historische Studien . The chapters of his volume can be consulted in open access here .

  (image source: Brill ) Prof. Dave De ruysscher published an article on Grotius and limited liability in Grotiana , as part of a symposium organised at Tilburg University on Grotius. Abstract: Grotius’s ideas on proportionate and limited liability, as mentioned in the Inleidinge and De iure belli ac pacis, were novel in comparison to the civilian doctrine of his time. Grotius drew from sources of local law and statutes regarding maritime law but was nonetheless original in his interpretations. Grotius proposed to consider the liability of co-owners of ships (reders, exercitores), who acted as organizers of maritime expeditions, and of others that were participating in these expeditions, as broad. At the same time, their liability was limited to the maximum of the value of the ship and cargo. In this regard, Grotius’s conceptions hinged on a view of a ship’s voyage as engendering a community of risk among all stakeholders. However, in spite of the underlying connections, Grotius d...

(image source: RW ) Prof. Dave De ruysscher published an article in open access in the journal Quaderni Storici, as part of a special issue "Risk Management and Jurisdictional Boundaries in Pre-Modern Europe" (ed. Maria Fusaro). Abstract: This article investigates the rules of jurisdiction that were applied in the case of damages in maritime transport. The focus is on traffic in one of the main riverine estuaries of the Low Countries, over the rivers Honte and Scheldt. In the course of the fifteenth century the governments of the county of Flanders and the duchy of Brabant had come to embrace a more exclusive notion of jurisdiction on rivers, which comprised the idea of precise demarcations. In practice, however, this new approach did not bring about more clarity. Uncertainty as to which forum would hear disputes on riverine shipping accidents marked a risk of trade. Among merchants and shipmasters, choice of jurisdiction was common, which happened after mishaps and was not ...

Abstract: Known as a journalist or 'compiler', Jean Rousset de Missy (1682-1762) contributed on the to the world's first treaty collections, the Corps Universel Diplomatique du Droit des Gens (1726-1731, edited by Jean Dumont). This contribution focuses on Les Intérêts présens des puissances de l'Europe (1733), a two-volume work published to serve as a practical alternative to the 8 volumes in-f° of the Corps Universel. Rousset discusses treaty obligations undertaken by sovereign entities, and links them up with an analysis of their long-term geopolitical interests. I sketch the impact of the Peace Treaties of Utrecht (1713) on Rousset's work, and argue that his treatment of the matter gives a unique insight into argumentative strategies. Parties in a quarrel use arguments drawn from the law of nature, Roman law, canon law, customary law, feudal law or domestic law, and only seldom refer to law of nations doctrine. Rousset's synthesis at the end of every section...

Dr. Stefano Cattelan (pp. 125-152) and Prof. Frederik Dhondt (pp. 153-176) authored chapters in the edited volume  Soggettività contestate e diritto internazionale in età moderna  (eds. Giuseppina de Giudici, Dante Fedele & Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina), vol. 9 of the series "Collana di studi di storia del diritto medievale e moderno" (edited by Paolo Alvazzi del Frate, Giovanni Rossi and Elio Tavilla).  Abstract of Challenging empires: pirates, privateers and the Europeanisation of ocean spaces (c. 1500-1650)  (dr. Stefano Cattelan): Throughout the Middle  Ages, piracy and hybrid warfare  (public/ private) remained endemic across the seas surrounding the European continent. Once Spain and Portugal opened new sailing routes towards the Americas and East Asia, these phenomena rapidly assumed an all-new geographical scale. With the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Spain and Portugal divided the Atlantic Ocean into two exclusive spheres of infl uence. In re...

(image source: Forum Historiae Iuris/UZH )   The peer reviewed open access journal Forum Historiae Iuris  has presently published all papers presented at the conference Entangled National and International Legal Orders in the Long Nineteenth Century in a Debate Section edited by dr. Raphaël Cahen , Prof. Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina (Zurich) and Prof. Frederik Dhondt . Two papers were published ahead of the others (see earlier on our site ): Introduction (Raphaël Cahen, Frederik Dhondt & Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina): here Nation-building e State-building nel ‘lungo’ Ottocento: miti identitari e strategie di dominio (Prof. em. Pietro Costa/Firenze): here The five papers presently added are: African Lawyers and the Strategic Uses of Legal Entanglements: the Case of the Gold Coast and Lagos (1880-1920) (Prof. Inge Van Hulle/KU Leuven-Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory): see here Sovereignty and the Problem of Order in Belize, 1763-1821  (Prof. Lisa...

  (Image: prof. Fiocchi Malaspina, Zurich, 3 March 2020) Dr. Raphaël Cahen and prof. Frederik Dhondt  co-edited with prof. Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina (Zurich) the special section “Entangled National and International Legal Orders in the Long Nineteenth Century” for the open access journal Forum Historiae Iuris. This section contains the papers presented at a conference hosted by the University of Zurich (Chair prof. Thier) in March 2020. The introduction and the first article (by prof. em. Pietro Costa (Firenze)) are already available. The contributions by prof. Lisa Ford (UNSW), prof. Inge Van Hulle (KU Leuven/Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt) and the three co-editors will be released in batches in the coming weeks. Read the introduction to discover more!