Volume 142, Issue 1

This article deals with the relationship between German royal jurisdiction and the jurisdictional privileges granted by the rulers in the period from 1273 to 1400, with a particular focus on conflicts over privileges. The study is organized according to the estates of the recipients of the privileges. Towards the end of the 13 th century, electors and princes gradually began to break away from royal jurisdiction, even if only some of them invoked jurisdictional privileges in practice. While the kings after the Interregnum tended to reserve royal jurisdiction for the privileged royal and episcopal cities, under Charles IV the freedom of the cities from royal jurisdiction was largely recognized. The development of jurisdictions was characterized by conflicts over jurisdictional privileges. The contentious and controversial relationship between cities and city lords sheds light on the juridification of the German later Middle Ages.

The office of the advocate has received enormous scholarly attention since the later nineteenth century. In his recent monograph on this subject, Corruption, Protection and Justice in Medieval Europe: A Thousand Year History , Jonathan Lyon has sought to provide a fundamentally new approach by emphasizing the ways in which the office of the advocate can be used to understand conflicts among numerous holders of power, both secular and ecclesiastical, over the control of property and the judicial authority over people. In doing so, however, Lyon has drawn overly broad conclusions and overlooked important elements of both con­tinuity and change in the relationship between the royal government and advocates in the German speaking lands, particularly in the early medieval period. The burden of the current study is to illuminate the ongoing efforts, and frequent success, of the rulers of the Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian dynasties to exercise control over advocates as they carried out the fundamentally public duty of providing justice to the king’s subjects.

The medieval land law in northwestern Germany differed in several respects from that of the Sachsenspiegel. The type and extent of land ownership influenced the degree of personal freedom. In the 13 th century, especially in Westphalia, distinct concepts of ownership developed for the nobility and city citizens on one hand, and the free farmers on the other. This led to the permanent assignment of the rural population to the nobility or to free or unfree peasantry in the late Middle Ages.

This article deals with the recent history of the private law of an in-between space that has not yet been the subject of detailed legal historical study, namely the history of the private law of Nordschleswig/Southern Jutland/Sønderjylland. The Duchy of Schleswig was ceded by Denmark to Prussia and Austria in 1864 and annexed by Prussia in 1866. In 1920, after a plebiscite, the northern part of Schleswig reverted to Denmark. Thus Schleswig changed national affiliation twice – in the same way and at the same time as Elsaß-Lothringen/Alsace-Lorraine/Alsace-Moselle did. This may have favoured the emergence of a local private law culture – comparable to the local law in eastern France, which is still in force today.

Just over a century ago, Germany suffered devastating hyperinflation. The economic and social upheaval was unprecedented. The Netherlands were largely spared the direct consequences. In economic and legal terms, the Netherlands felt the effects of hyperinflation indirectly; for example, in the form of disputes between creditors with claims for money denominated in German Marks and the debtors of these claims. One such case resulted in the well-known Mark = Mark judgment (1931) of the Dutch Supreme Court. This article presents the background to this case and examines the hyperinflation problem in its contemporary legal context. First, this article places the established reading of the judgment in the legal context of the time by means of detailed legal-historical comments. The common reading is that the judgment focuses on the principle of nominalism and rejects the doctrine of the limiting effect of what we now call reasonableness and equity, good faith. Second, we show that this judgment was not groundbreaking but, on the contrary, preserved the boundaries between the German and Dutch legal systems: the judgment corresponded to the views on international monetary relations that were dominant at the time but have since come under increasing pressure. Third, we use the economic context to show that the Mark = Mark ruling was primarily a decision by Dutch judges who felt safe behind the ‘dikes’ of the Dutch gold standard. Looking at the economic context in Germany after the ‘Great War’, it becomes clear how complex the underlying currency devaluation problem in Germany actually was, and how much the Netherlands and its Supreme Court distanced themselves from this problem.

This paper examines a change in legal arguments during German late socialism. Tracing the concept of legal certainty, it analyses how a specific legal language was implemented to secure party power but became increasingly autonomous in the 1980s. As a corollary, this language was used to call for reforms, as shown here using the judicial review of administrative acts as a case study. Based on contributions published as part of the so-called “law propaganda”, (inter alia censored) academic articles and archival material, current assumptions about the structure and impact of legal arguments in the GDR are challenged.

The article seeks answers from Swedish early modern court records, whether the hunger and poverty related thefts were considered as mitigating circumstances in legal practices. While still in the fifteenth century, these thefts often incurred reduced penalties, the hardened legislation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries indicates a shift away from such practices. Instead, there was an increase in the number of measures aimed at controlling the vagrant population, evident in the handling of poverty-related thefts and the severity of the imposed penalties. These thefts have not been previously examined from this perspective in Sweden during this period, partly due to the absence of clear definition. The hypothesis of the article is that the echoes of the medieval maxim of extreme necessity could have had an influence occasionally on legal practice even if it was not on written law. As a result of the research around a hundred theft cases, the practical customs differed from the legislation, which can be seen in the mitigations of the sentences in the court records of Stockholm and Vadstena. The nature of the thefts themselves did not change much, but the stricter control probably brought them out. As a summarized result of this article, the legislation changed more in the documents than it did in practise.

The Olomouc Bishopric was among the most important church institutions in the medieval Czech lands. During the episcopate of Bruno of Schauenburg (1245–1281), a feudal system was established on the bishop’s estates, becoming one of the pillars of the power of the Bishops of Olomouc. The medieval feudal system of the Olomouc Bishopric in the thirteenth century was based on legal foundations influenced by a Western European environment. These legal principles were primarily derived from the Saxon legal sphere. In the second half of the fourteenth century, we can observe a more significant influence of Moravian provincial law. Bishop Stanislav Thurzó (1496–1540) ordered a legally binding collection of feudal law to be printed in 1538 under the name of Práva manská (a Czech translation of the Schwabenspiegel’), which was supplemented by several decisions of the feudal court. However, this collection of law was not used in practice and, on the contrary, during his episcopate the influence of Moravian provincial law increased significantly. Many legal instruments and concepts (Rechts­institute) of Moravian provincial law, both in the field of substantive and procedural law, were adopted into the feudal law practiced in the feudal system of the Bishops of Olomouc. The method of keeping records in legal manuscripts at the feudal court was eventually copied from the Moravian provincial court. Only simple rituals remained from the original feudal law and, paradoxically, more elements of feudal law appear only towards the end of the period under study.

An Heirloom of Electoral Saxon Judicial Supervision – Specificationes of the Lists Mandated for Submission by the Faculty of Law and the Schöffenstuhl in Wittenberg (1741–1756). The Wittenberg Faculty of Law was among the most significant jurisprudential faculties in the Holy Roman Empire, gaining particular prominence in the 18th century due to its high volume of inquiries. The extensive records, preserved in Halle and Dresden, remain largely unexplored. However, a comprehensive register of the faculty’s jurisprudential output between 1741 and 1756 is preserved in the Dresden Hauptstaatsarchiv. Its contents are currently being digitally edited within a project led by the Wittenberg Leucorea Foundation.

The Legal Person and its Bildungsroman in the 19th Century . The article discusses Karl-Heinz Ladeur’s book ‘Das Rechtssubjekt und sein Bildungsroman im 19. Jahrhundert’ from a legal-historical perspective. It is, therefore, not a theoretical engagement with Ladeur. Instead, it focuses on two main questions: To what extent does Ladeur engage with the factual reality of the 19 th century, that is, does he delve into a depth of sources that renders the text relevant to legal history? Secondly, does he address legal-historical literature and seek an interdisciplinary dialogue?