You are warmly invited to a manuscript workshop hosted by the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought on 16 December, 10am-6pm.

Charlotte Johann (Leverhulme Early Career Scholar, School of Society and Environment, Department of History, QMUL):

The Quest for Law is a book about how law lives on in the absence of sovereignty. It recounts the story of how German jurists established a common regime of private law in Germany’s ‘stateless’ period, between the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the founding of the Kaiserreich in 1871. The book revolves around Friedrich Carl von Savigny and the historical school of law, one of the nineteenth century’s most influential legal movements, both in Germany and across the globe. It contextualises Savigny’s main achievements, from his fierce critique of codification to his contributions to Germany’s revival of Justinianic Roman Law, the rise of the German research university, and Prussian state-building. In doing so, the book presents a new account of the making of legal order in nineteenth century, tracing the fine line between common and international law, the law of the nation and the law of nations. Savigny’s jurisprudence, the book shows, embodied an approach to the rule of law that carried on the constitutional legacy of the Holy Roman Empire, resisting its eclipse by a ‘Westphalian’ state system. His intellectual trajectory both illuminates and complicates the construction of modern legal order along the distinctions of public versus private, municipal versus international, positive versus natural law. In exploring nineteenth-century Germany as a crucible for the possibility of a law that stretched between and across sovereign states, The Quest for Law establishes new connections between European intellectual history, the legal history of empires, and the history of international order.

Martti Koskenniemi (Helsinki), Michael Lobban (Oxford), Anna Ross (Sheffield), Georgios Varouxakis (QMUL).

The workshop will consist of a detailed chapter-by-chapter discussion of the manuscript. All are welcome, but registration is essential at: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-quest-for-law-tickets-1848310098259?aff=oddtdtcreator