Rechtsgeschiedenis op nieuwe wegen. Legal history, moving in new directions.

It is a fixed custom that Belgian and Dutch universities take turns to organize the biannual Belgian-Dutch Legal History Conference. On 11 and 12 December 2014 the twenty-first edition of this conference was held at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The conference traditionally serves as a platform for ongoing legal-historical research and it provides a forum for presentations by young scholars. This book bundles the papers that were presented at the Brussels conference and which are the outcome of a process of double-blind peer review.

The papers demonstrate the variety of topics and methods that are currently being practised among legal historians. The nineteenth-century insistence on either Roman or national law, which to a large extent lives on in education, cannot be retrieved in present-day research. For some topics, such as international law, labour law and commercial law, recent research initiatives are abundant, and this is well reflected in the contents of this book.

There is also renewal in terms of methodology. Legal historians do no longer limit themselves to an analysis of legal texts. Attention goes to legal practice, both in its formative aspects, as well as to the application of legal texts (laws, treaties, …). Political and legal history are more commonly being blended together. A thorough contextual approach includes analyses of institutional, political and legal developments. The contributions by Paul Nève, Brecht Deseure, Raymond Kubben and Shavanah Musa provide examples of this method. Furthermore, links between political philosophy and law are explored, which is evident in the chapters written by Maarten Colette and Lukas van den Berge. Doctrine is considered from a contextual viewpoint as well. Frederik Dhondt highlights the impact of the Spanish War of Succession on the scholarly writings of Vattel and Réal de Curban.

Another development in contemporary legal-historical research is the comparative approach. In his text, Wouter Druwé draws up a comparison between the Roman condictio and the English writ of debt. Agustin Parise traces the influence of the Dutch Civil Code (1838) in the Argentine code of 1871. Matthias Castelein examines the relations between Genoese and Corsican government. Marten Reijntjes focuses on the responsibility of judges from a comparative-historical perspective. Benoît Lagasse details the ideas of the Liège jurist Charles de Méan against the background of the Roman and local legal traditions. The interactions between Belgian and Dutch jurists over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are analysed in the contribution of Sebastiaan Vandenbogaerde.

This book provides ample evidence of the rich nature of legal-historical scholarship in the Low Countries of today. May it be a steppingstone for further research.