Category Archives: Legal History
Vagelis Papakonstantinou, ‘Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law’
ABSTRACT The turn of the 1980s was a milestone period in the development of data privacy laws, that was only paralleled by the turn of the 2020s. The former saw the introduction of Convention 108 by the Council of Europe in 1981 and, four months earlier, the OECD’s Guidelines ‘governing the Protection of Privacy and […]
Maria Andrianova, ‘The Category of Fiduciary in Private Law’
ABSTRACT It seems that fiduciary relations are a special category of legal relations, the basis of which is trust between the parties Often fiduciary relations are limited in scope (within the framework of contracts of assignment, commission, agency, as well as trust management of property). However, fiduciary relations are a more complex category; reference to […]
Paul Raffield, ‘Shakespeare and the theatre of early modern law’
ABSTRACT Taking as my cue the Introduction to the First Folio edition of his plays, I examine Shakespeare’s particular interest in English law and juridical procedure. It is likely that his considerable, detailed knowledge of law derived at least in part from his association with the Middle Temple, whose members included neighbours and friends from […]
‘Laws of Ice and Fire: George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire cycle from a legal historian’s perspective’
George RR Martin’s (unfinished) Song of Ice and Fire series, also, as Game of Thrones, a massively successful TV series, is set in a quasi-medieval fantasy world. I am happy to note that there is quite a bit of legal content, with references to trials, laws, lawmakers. It falls within the Venn diagram overlap of […]
‘The Afterlife of Hungarian Private Law following the Treaty of Trianon – Miklós Ujlaki’s Critical Approach to Legal Unification’
The story of comparative law in Hungary in the Interwar years is largely unknown to the foreign audience. The main reasons for this include the practical inaccessibility of the relevant Hungarian sources and the ideologically led oblivion during the communist days. This piece presents the almost completely forgotten oeuvre of Miklós Újlaki, who played a […]
Herbert Kritzer, ‘Empirical Research on Civil Justice: A Brief History’
ABSTRACT In this forthcoming chapter to appear in the Research Handbook on Civil Justice edited by Anne Bloom, David Engel, and Richard Jolly for Edward Elgar Publishing, I trace the history of empirical civil justice research (ECJR) from the first decades of the twentieth century through approximately 1990. I identify several distinct periods of research […]
Gregory Klass, ‘A Short History of the Interpretation-Construction Distinction’
ABSTRACT This document collects for ease of access and citation three of my posts on the New Private Law Blog, which chart the conceptual history of the interpretation-construction distinction. The posts begin with Francis Lieber’s 1939 introduction of the concepts, then describes Samuel Williston’s 1920 account of the distinction in the first edition of Williston […]
Jacco Bomhoff, ‘Cold-War Private International Law’
ABSTRACT This paper explores the character of Private International Law, or the Conflict of Laws, during the Cold War. It does this mainly by looking at one specific site where legal scholars and practitioners from the different blocs and non-aligned parts of the world, continued to come together to discuss their field: the yearly summer […]
Leslie Katz, ‘Yet Again, Anthony Trollope Fails to Steer his Little Bark Clear of the Rocks and Shoals of the Law; This Time, it’s the Rocks and Shoals of the Law of Injunctions’
ABSTRACT In Phineas Redux, Phineas Finn is granted by the Court of Chancery an injunction prohibiting the publication of a libel, but at the date at which we’re to take it that such an injunction was granted, the Court of Chancery had no jurisdiction to grant injunctions prohibiting the publication of libels. Even if the […]
Peter Hay, ‘On the Road to a Third American Restatement of Conflicts Law’
ABSTRACT American private international law (Conflict of Laws, ‘Conflicts Law’) addresses procedure (jurisdiction of courts, recognition of judgments) as well as the choice of the applicable law. The last of these has been a mystery to many scholars and practitioners – indeed, even in the United States. Since 2014 the American Law Institute now seeks […]