Bøger i Studies in the History of Law and Justice serien

This work focuses specifically on the 18th century supreme court of the Austrian Netherlands and provides a broad overview with attention to other aspects of the tribunal's functioning and to its role in 18th century attempts at state formation.

This open access book can be downloaded from link.springer.comLegal studies and consequently legal history focus on constitutional documents, believing in a nominalist autonomy of constitutional semantics. Reconsidering Constitutional Formation in the late 18th and 19th century, kept historic constitutions from being simply log-books for political experts through a functional approach to the interdependencies between constitution and public discourse. Sovereignty had to be ¿believed¿ by the subjects and the political élites. Such a communicative orientation of constitutional processes became palpable in the ¿religious¿ affinities of the constitutional preambles. They were held as ¿creeds¿ of a new order, not only due to their occasional recourse to divine authority, but rather due to the claim for eternal validity contexts of constitutional guarantees. The communication dependency of constitutions was of less concern in terms of the preamble than the constituents¿ big worries about government organisation. Their indecisiveness between monarchical and popular sovereignty was established through the discrediting of the Republic in the Jacobean reign of terror and the ¿renaissance¿ of the monarchy in the military resistance against the French revolutionary and later Napoleonic campaigns. The constitutional formation as a legal act of constituting could therefore defend the monarchy from the threat of the people (Albertine Statute 1848), could be a legal decision of a national constituent assembly (Belgian Constitution 1831), could borrow from the old liberties (Polish May Constitution 1791) or try to remain in between by referring to the Nation as sovereign (French September Constitution 1791, Cádiz Constitution 1812). Common to all contexts is the use of national sovereignty as a legal starting point. The consequent differentiation between constituent and constituted power manages to justify the self-commitment of political power in legal terms. National sovereignty is the synonym for the juridification of sovereignty by means of the constitution. The novelty of the constitutions of the late 18th and 19th century is the normativity, the positivity of the constitutional law as one unified law, to be the measure for the legality of all other law. Therefore ReConFort will continue with the precedence of constitution. (www.reconfort.eu)

This volume examines the property transformations in post-communist Central Eastern Europe (CEE) and focuses on the role of restitution and privatisation in such transformations.

This book is based on an international project conducted by the Institute for European Studies of the University CEU San Pablo in Madrid and a seminar on Vitoria and International Law which took place on July 2nd 2015 in the convent of San Esteban, the place where Vitoria spent his most productive years as Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca.  It argues that Vitoria not only lived at a time bridging the Middle Ages and Modernity, but also that his thoughts went beyond the times he lived in, giving us inspiration for meeting current challenges that could also be described as ¿modern¿ or even post-modern.There has been renewed interest in Francisco de Vitoria in the last few years, and he is now at the centre of a debate on such central international topics as political modernity, colonialism, the discovery of the ¿Other¿ and the legitimation of military interventions. All these subjects include Vitoriäs contributions to the formation of the idea of modernity andmodern international law.The book explores two concepts of modernity: one referring to the post-medieval ages and the other to our times. It discusses the connections between the challenges that the New World posed for XVIth century thinkers and those that we are currently facing, for example those related to the cyberworld. It also addresses the idea of international law and the legitimation of the use of force, two concepts that are at the core of Vitoriäs texts, in the context of ¿modern¿ problems related to a multipolar world and the war against terrorism. This is not a historical book on Vitoria, but a very current one that argues the value of Vitoriäs reflections for contemporary issues of international law.

This second volume of ReConFort, published open access, addresses the decisive role of constitutional normativity, and focuses on discourses concerning the legal role of constitutional norms.

This book examines how the nation - and its (fundamental) law - are 'sensed' by way of various aesthetic forms from the age of revolution up until our age of contested democratic legitimacy.