Some 270 people had registered for the biennial conference of German-speaking legal historians, which feels a bit like a class reunion and was held in Frankfurt am Main for the second time (the first was in 1986). At the opening evening in the Festsaal of the Casino building, the participants were already making contact with colleagues both old and new, and engaging in lively conversation. Inspired by the cross-border diversity of languages and texts in the later Roman Empire, the historian Hartmut Leppin gave a talk on the relationship between multilingualism and law. His lecture was the first on the program and he skillfully guided the audience to “The language of the sources,” the theme of the conference held from September 16 to 20. Astrid Wallrabenstein, a judge at the German Constitutional Court, had delivered a welcome address calling on the audience of legal historians to take a forward-looking approach not least in their choice of scientific language, and the conference program also promised to examine current developments such as change in the media.
On the first full day of the congress in the SKW-Building, however, the program began with plenary lectures and sections on very traditional topics within the field: translation problems from Roman law, the political influence of medieval lawyers, epistemic practices in laws of Antiquity, and the differences between the law of the sea and the law on land. At the Mayor’s reception in the evening in the Imperial Hall of Frankfurt’s city hall, Ina Hartwig, the city’s Head of Department for Culture and Science, recalled the city’s efforts to promote a contemporary culture of remembrance, such as the activities connected with St. Paul’s Church and a new House of Democracy.
A new feature of the Legal History Conference came on the following day when projects, especially those of early career researchers, were presented in a swift but informative kind of speed dating at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. Having simultaneous events in five different rooms did not work absolutely perfectly – which left some attendees disappointed that they had missed particular presentations. Would it have been better to give an AI-supported application the job of organization? In the morning plenary session, the new technologies were addressed in a lecture on handling archival sources of ecclesiastical law. This theme was continued in a separate section on ecclesiastical law and digital humanities in the afternoon, while a parallel discussion took place on the sources of a new global legal history that changes and expands the conventional understanding of how sources reach us, say, when it takes greater account of material cultures than has generally been the case to date.
Media change and AI
The last conference day was devoted to conflicts and their legal resolution, which was the subject of a lecture on the history of sources of labor law, and of a section on “Violence and Justice in Situations of Upheaval”. A panel discussion on change in the media and its consequences for the culture of publication in legal history also generated discussion among the listeners. The panel of international and interdisciplinary guests identified in particular a larger number and diversity of available publication formats which, however, was accompanied by a problematic flood of information. The self-confident postulates of some senior professors in the audience saying that far too much was published in any case, and when publishing it would be no problem to pay more attention to having fun instead of high-class moaning, obviously irritated the early career academics who were present – which comes as no surprise given the keen competition for third-party funding and in view of further economic strictures and uncertainties. There was less controversy in the afternoon, when the opportunities and risks were examined that accompany the use of Artificial Intelligence, e.g. in the recording and evaluation of extensive source corpora – is the machine learning turn a direct route to more and better findings or to fake science? The positive view prevailed, but above all the participants were agreed that in the future the importance of methodological awareness and transparent ways of reaching an understanding of one’s own research in the scientific community would tend to increase rather than decrease.
The four organizers Albrecht Cordes, Thomas Duve, David von Mayenburg and Guido Pfeifer from the Institute for the History of Law, found that the 44th Legal History Conference delivered what its program had promised, and proved its value as a forum for active exchange on current issues in legal history, including the discipline’s methods and self-image. This was confirmed by the positive feedback of the departing attendees, whereby the social program consisting of a guided tour of the campus, a grand concert evening and two optional excursions to the town of Ingelheim am Rhein and the Saalburg (a reconstructed Roman fort), probably also contributed to the agreeable atmosphere at the event.
Guido Pfeifer
