Lecture Series: Law in a Transnational Context, MPI Frankfurt

Law in a Transnational Context
Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Series of Lectures from January to April 2011

The world of traditional legal theories has become too small. It seems too small for a law that is more and more losing its old territorial, political, and national bonds and that becomes part of worldwide social and economic processes. Law of this kind tends to statelessness. It is no more focussed on a territory, national state, or a local community, but constitutes itself through the communicative networks of highly specialised discourses. The production of law shifts from the nation state to the specific dynamic of social systems which conventional terms and criteria of politically orientated legal theories hardly touch upon. Terms like “constitution”, “legislation”, “unity”, “hierarchy”, “sanction” etc. become uncertain. Nowadays law is at home in a world that is fragmentary, that has no centre, no middle point, or unity. Legal pluralism dominates the scenery.

“Globalization” is the common word for this phenomenon, which is accompanied by a review of traditional concepts of law, of their premises and implications. Legal history is constantly confronted with phenomena of this kind, especially when processes of global interlacing beyond territorial and national boundaries are being examined, or when societies with a plurality of norms are being put into perspective.

The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence at the Goethe-University Frankfurt will start in the winter term 2010/2011 a series of lectures dedicated to historical paradigms and theoretical concepts of such processes. Scholars from different countries and with strong expertise in theory and history of law, in sociology and political sciences will hold lectures about chosen subjects.


Lecture: Wo bleibt der Dritte im Rechtspluralismus?
13. January 2011
Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther, Institut für Kriminalwissenschaften und Rechtsphilosophie der Uni Frankfurt

Lecture: Domesticating Modernities: Transfer of Ideologies and Institutions in Southeastern Europe
3rd February 2011
Prof. Dr. Diana Mishkova, Director of Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS)

Lecture: International Law in a World of Empires: Constructing a Global Prohibition Regime in the Long Nineteenth Century
7th March 2011
Prof. Dr. Lauren Benton, History Department, New York University

Lecture: The New Global Law. A Historical Perspective
14th April 2011
Prof. Dr. Rafael Domingo Oslé, Faculty of Law, Universidad de Navarra