Volume 141, Issue 1

The evaluation of Liber Papiensis, an important legal collection from the 11 th century, is still uncertain as the research on the manuscripts which provides a basis for empirical discussion has not been sufficiently carried out. This article discusses the existence and characteristics of common models on which the Liber Papiensis manuscripts rely by analyzing the arrangement of clauses, the annotations for their revision and the notes mentioning relevant clauses in the oldest existent Milanese manuscripts. After identifying the author of them, it will also be argued that they were produced not directly in the environment of the lawyers of Pavia, as assumed, but from the circumstances of a local judge in Turin.

The Law of Beaumont, established by a charter issued in 1182, was granted over a period of about 150 years for up to 700 villages in present-day France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. It seemingly was to provide incentives to settle or stay in such villages. Based on an analysis of the Latin text (provided with a German translation) the paper questions that the focus of the charter was accurately described in older literature and common handbook entries. In those, the impression is given that the focus was on liberation from serfdom, tax relief and municipal self-government. The paper concludes that a high degree of self-government was indeed an outstanding feature, although it remains unclear whether the citizens originally had the right to elect mayor and jurors. Particularly favourable tax burdens could not be substantiated. There is no mentioning at all of any liberation from serfdom and burdens associated with it. The focus of the charter is on a precise definition of tax burdens and of penalties for crimes and their distribution, and on rules of legal process. Legal certainty in these regards must have been the core of its attractiveness both for citizens and lords and explain its popularity.

The essay examines late medieval discussions concerning ‘Kaiserrecht’ (Imperial Law, Emperor’s Law) in northern and eastern Germany. A closer look at the municipal law of Lüneburg (1401) with its different layers of customs, book of statutes, ‘Kaiserrecht’ and Canon law shows clearly the problem. Notwithstanding the close similarity to the learned concept of the theory of the statutes, the Lüneburg source did in fact not follow the erudited hierarchy of particular law and civil law. The city possessed some manuscripts of the so called ‘Schwabenspiegel’ (Swabian Mirror) and the ‘Kleines Kaiserrecht’ (Emperor’s Little Law) which were both, contemporarily, denominated as ‘Kaiserrecht’.

In medieval and early modern Germany, the Einlager (lat. obstagium) was a widespread practice of private debt enforcement. Parties stipulated that in case the debtor defaulted, contractually agreed on persons, usually the debtor and/or sureties along with members of their retinue, would confine themselves to given premises, usually a public house, for as long as the debt was left unpaid. During that time, all costs for boarding and lodging were to be borne by the debtor. This legal institution was meant to increase the economic pressure on the debtor and keep him from pursuing his usual private and professional life. Voluntarily agreeing to the Einlager, publicly committing to a debt as well as submitting to slander should the debtor not turn himself in all hinged on contemporary codes of honour – the debtor vouched his personal honour when he took on him the possibility of the Einlager. At the same time, the Einlager itself was perceived to leave personal honour intact. This meant that it was popular in cases in which distraint for debt proved difficult; particularly noble debtors and cities found it to be acceptable. However, increasing economic pressure on an already defaulting debtor had always been viewed sceptically. During the course of the 16 th century, criticism of the Einlager grew more intensive and new facets were added to it. Prolonged stays in pubs, sometimes in excess of a year, were now deemed detrimental to public as well as private morality. More importantly, the Einlager as a means of private, autonomous debt enforcement that used personal honour as a leverage point was increasingly perceived as a challenge to early modern concepts of territorial lordship, as it ignored governmental jurisdiction. Early modern German legislation addressing the issue introduced a new argument: It criticized that those employing the Einlager made themselves judges in their own causes. Assailed on all sides, the Einlager thus quickly fell into disuse around 1600. Only in a few northern German regions it was moderated by legislation and employed well into the 19 th century.

The article discusses the notion of ‘legal humanism’, i.e. the encounter between jurisprudence and fundamental ideas of Renaissance humanists. Legal historians are fundamentally divided over the impact of humanistic thought on legal development. While some influential authors regard the insights and ideas of Renaissance humanists as largely irrelevant to legal thinking, others identify a group of ‘legal humanists’ and describe them as modernisers whose innovative forms of ‘humanistic’ legal thinking initiated developments that ultimately led to modern law. In view of this debate, the article analyses writings of Valla, Budé, Zasius, Alciato and other humanists in their historical contexts. It will be shown that these authors cannot be properly described as ‘modernisers’ as they did not advance new ideas that transformed legal thinking. Nevertheless, the conceptions of time and the philological insights of Renaissance humanism irritated established forms of scholastic legal thinking and made jurists reflect on their scholarship. The new forms of legal thinking that emerged from those 16 th -century discussions did not make use of specifically humanistic, philological techniques, but should rather be seen as specifically legal responses to the humanistic irritation.

This contribution discusses the ambivalent role of the telephone in commodity futures trading. On one hand, the telephone proved to be useful in commodity futures trading since it was easier to use than the telegraph; on the other, it helped to spread prejudices about the commodity futures business. Indeed, this became a political issue in the 1890s as reforms were demanded. The large agrarians of Prussia in the East were particularly interested in these reforms. Above all, the marginal trading deriving from commodity futures was accused of being ‘unfair business’ and provoked great controversy among jurists before 1891. The prevailing view was that marginal trading ‘was the equivalent of a lottery contract’ and thus could not be litigated in court. Max Weber argued forcefully against this view in his work on stock markets, and the view was eventually rendered obsolete by a judgement from the Supreme Court of the Reich, which prompted law makers to act. Although the telephone benefited commodity trading, it also aroused perceptions of unproductive activity which were easy to associate with the view of commodity futures trading as a form of lottery. This was particularly the case because the self worth of workers rested at the end of the 19 th century on ‘hard physical labour’, so that the impression of idleness was not tolerated. This is supported by Popitz’s essay “Was tun wir, wenn wir spielen” from 2000: ‘The actions of gamblers do not [leave behind] a product. [Rather], when they play, they are being creative in an unproductive way.’ As such, the telephone helped commodity futures trading to communicate quickly, but at the same time it was also a symbol of unproductive activity and thereby fed the widespread mistrust of the commodity futures business and its associated marginal trading.

In contrast with China’s several millennia of civilization history, its history of civil law legislation had not started until the late Qing-Dynasty (1911). This discrepancy stood out prominently in the correlated areas of the family law and inheritance law due to China’s cultural features and the compatible cultural awareness of its people, which had naturalized and legitimized their practices in both areas. Actually, in no other areas had the cultural consciousness, the deep-rooted cultural psychology and the consciousness-driven behavioral patterns of the Chinese families and individuals been more profoundly shaped by the rules of rites and etiquette, the ethical rules and the patriarchal clan system, central customary-legal elements enshrined in the Chinese history. As its key achievement, the legal modernization in the late Qing period (1902–1911) brought forth the Civil Code of the Qing- Dynasty (ZGE), the first such milestone in China’s legal history, initiating the civil law legislation in China. With regard to China’s special legal-historical and legal-cultural background, the drafters of the ZGE – especially its family and inheritance law – had to revolutionarily modernize the Chinese civil law, while at the same time, transferring certain traditional cultural legacies. This could not have been possible without adopting the German Civil Code (BGB) as the primary foreign codification model, especially from the legal-technical, legal-systematic and legal-dogmatic perspective. Ever since then, the evolution of the Chinese civil law has been closely connected with the adoption of the BGB, while the history of the former runs parallel to the history of the latter. The influences of the BGB on China’s major civil law codifications, including also the Civil Code of the Republic of China (1929–1931) and the PRC Civil Code (2020), have been significant and continuous. It is legal-historically insightful to probe into these influences while examining the evolutionary history of the Chinese family and inheritance law ever codified since the ZGE, and, accordingly, retracing and closely analyzing the pre-modern state of both areas.

The Schieder-Conze controversy questioned the relationship between the German academic community and the National Socialist government; however, research on how the Japanese academic community dealt with the German-Japanese alliance is still in progress. This study focuses on Toyowo Ōgushi, a Ministry of Education official who invited Professor Otto Koellreutter of the University of Munich to Tokyo as a Japanese-German exchange professor, and his academic friend Teiji Yabe, an assistant professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo. Ōgushi, whose mentor was the conservative constitutional scholar Uesugi Shinkichi, left the graduate school of the Imperial University of Tokyo, which had highly liberal and socialist tendencies. He studied constitutional law at the University of Jena between 1928 and 1933, where he was influenced by Koellreutter and Carl Schmitt. Upon returning to Japan, Ōgushi became a proponent of German National Socialist jurisprudence. Ōgushi and his former schoolmate Teiji Yabe invited Koellreutter to visit Tokyo. As a researcher of democratic theory, Yabe had become an assistant professor at the Imperial University of Tokyo, but he had moved to the University of Munich in 1936 to study under Koellreutter after becoming increasingly critical of parliamentary democracy. The Faculty of Law of the Imperial University of Tokyo, which retained liberal tendencies, was not entirely at ease with Koellreutter. Nonetheless, the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University of Tokyo conducted systematic research on the already established German National Socialist regime; moreover, its tone was not always critical, and it did not prevent the alliance between Japan and Germany as they moved towards war.

This article aims to shed light on how the resumption of research and teaching in public law at the Faculty of Law in Heidelberg developed after the collapse of National Socialist rule. In particular, the personnel, research and teaching are examined. Thus, the history of Heidelberg University will be further elaborated in a specific field of research. Furthermore, the article provides another small building block for an overall picture of post-war history at the 16 law faculties in the early Federal Republic. The end of National Socialist rule did not lead to a “Stunde Null”; rather, university operations were resumed with remarkable speed within the existing institutional structures. After the horrors of the Second World War, the Heidelberg law faculty set out to reconnect with the Weimar era. On the other hand, the emerging new legal system created points of contact for future-oriented research and teaching.

The village Reppichau in Sachsen-Anhalt, situated near the towns Dessau, Köthen and Aken (former principality of Anhalt), is closely connected with Eike von Repgow – the author of the most famous mediaeval German law book “Saxon Mirror” (Sachsenspiegel). The law book was written by him between 1220 and 1235. Based on this fact, representatives of science, politics and justice periodically organized in collaboration with the villagers anniversary celebrations, for example 1934 (700 st year of the death of Eike von Repgow) and 1959 (800 st year of the first documented mention of the village Reppichau). So it happened that the minister of justice of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hilde Benjamin (1902–1989), held a keynote speech in Reppichau on 28 June 1959. She was one of the leading representatives of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany during the early years of the GDR. She became famous as a presiding judge in political show trials with court rulings including exceptionally harsh punishments up to the death penalty. This women, who was also known as “Red Hilde” or “Bloody Hilde”, used the opportunity of her speech in Reppichau in order to integrate Eike von Repgow, the Saxon Mirror and the villagers into the ruling ideology of the early GDR. Furthermore, she attacked the NATO in general and the Federal Republic of Germany in particular with propaganda phrases. The text of this speech, representing an interesting example of contemporary legal history, is edited here for the first time based on an original copy.

Textbooks and Handbooks are perhaps the most relevant and typical outcome of Legal Historiography in the strong national traditions in Europe. The article presents a very thorough description of this very rich phenomenon and its representatives in postwar Italy. Some critics and propositions are integrated. We don’t have such fundamental information It gives very helpful orientation and ideas of comparisons.

In medieval studies, the “Liber legum of Lupus of Ferrières” has long been a firmly associated pair of terms, although the identity of the author is by no means certain and has been repeatedly called into doubt. The paper reconstructs how this opinion has prevailed, and critically examines the arguments put forward in favor of it. Given the paucity of reliable evidence, adherence to the hypothesis seems to be due primarily to the appeal of combining a well-known work with a famous name. Since the sources used for the Liber legum as well as its manuscript tradition clearly point to Italy, it seems most likely that Lupus was an Italian collector of legal texts, who had a personal relationship with the patron of the work, Margrave Eberhard of Friuli.

During the High Middle Ages, hereditary land tenure prevailed throughout East-Central Europe, often in a formalised manner based upon the ius emphyteuticum, whereby peasants were guaranteed a stable amount of land rents to be paid to landlords. There was, however, a legal institution that enabled the landlords to practically renegotiate original settlement contracts without openly violating them, in order to increase their income: the law of re-measurement of settlements (ius mensurationis). On examples from Silesia and Bohemia we have demonstrated that the landlords used this means plentifully, either directly through its actual implementation, or indirectly by renouncing their claims for payment. We have also hypothesized on the rationale and origin of the ius mensurationis, analyzed who could raise claims based upon it, and commented on the formulas related to this legal institution, which may be found there in Silesian and Bohemian charters.

This miscellany reviews a substantial contribution to the research on German judicature and legal culture in the early 19 th century by legal historian Clara Günzl: “Eine andere Geschichte der Begründungspflicht. Sichtweisen des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts” (2021). Her solid reconstruction is far more convincing than the older contribution of Stephan Hocks: “Gerichtsgeheimnis und Begründungszwang” (2002). The second part of the miscellany outlines that nevertheless further research has to be conducted to understand the development from a cross-epochal point of view, especially concerning the function of the so called Aktenversendung (transmissio actorum) to the law faculties of the German universities.

This article presents newly discovered manuscripts and single leaves of German-language customary law books. It describes variations to the manusripts and single leaves listed in U.-D. Oppitz, “Deutsche Rechtsbücher des Mittelalters”, vol. II, Cologne 1990.