Legal History 2: News from the Legal Past

• Credit value: 15 credits at Level 5
• Convenor: Anton Schütz

During the past three or four decades, the dominant discourse was based on the robust faith that all the worries, problems and shortcomings plaguing humanity are firmly situated within the range of mastery and masterability - at least 'over the long term'. This faith has now imploded.

Last-ditch economic rescue interventions, no longer deniable ecological threats, new-old fundamentalisms and increasing ethnic identitarianisms, to name but a few factors, have recently overcast the optimistic outlook with a looming, multi-faceted crisis mood. The confident reliance on always possible innovations and unlimited innovative possibilities, marks of a generalised entrepreneurial attitude, has disappeared. For the first time, the available strategies, programmes and 'dispositives' (Foucault) are confronted with a problem-horizon which might, quite realistically, durably escape their control.

This option module responds to this new situation. It offers a first encounter with some decisive features of the European legal past in view of their ongoing effects.

One central project of the 10 sessions will be to introduce Roman law and Roman legal history. Another is the revisiting of the major divide running through European legal history: Roman and Common Law. A third central theme is ongoing contamination with free-flowing and denaturalised bits and pieces of Roman law that is endemic in Western history, early modern and modern, well into the twentieth century. The modern survival or afterlife of Roman law and its political implications will form the third large topic. Finally, a fourth topic will focus on issues of method in legal history.