In July 2021 no less than three historic sites in the Netherlands, actually three groups of sites and buildings, have been officially recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The Dutch part of the limes, the northern frontier of the Roman empire, the defense line of the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie with water, sluices and fortifications around Holland from Amsterdam to Dordrecht, and the Koloniën van Weldadigheid, the "Colonies of Benevolence", a number of settlements for poor people who could escape from slums and start to build a new life working hard in the northern province Drenthe. Both ..read more

It seems difficult these weeks at my blog to leave Frankfurt am Main for other locations. The news about the death of Michael Stolleis on March 18, 2021 cannot be passed over here in silence, and thus again Frankfurt comes into view. Some obituaries succeeded very well in showing Stolleis' role and achievements, and therefore I will not try to repeat everything already said with eloquent words ..read more

This year I waited long, perhaps too long, before finally writing something about the sequence of events from election, confirmation and the attack at the Capitol to the inauguration of a new president of the United States. I will not take on the mantle of a prophet seeing the future by looking into the past to explain anything about these momentous events. By now so much words have been devoted to them, and to the forseeable future, that I will not bother you with my personal views on this situation. Instead I will simply give here an overview of my posts concerning the United States publishe ..read more

At a moment when the turmoil around the election of a new president of the United States of America is still living history, thoughts naturally turn to the key elements in the administration and government. The nomination of a new judge to the Supreme Court did not help immediately lead to more stability. Political division in the Congress seems to harden. It is no wonder people look at the American constitution as a beacon of light and direction. In this post I will look at some of the online resources for studying the American constitution, in particular ConSource , just before it will ..read more

Last year ordinances rightly figured here in a post about the Dutch book trade in the seventeenth century. Printing and publishing ordinances on behalf of authorities formed a stable core business for printers and publishers. In 2019 a project started to digitize Belgian and Dutch Early Modern printed collections of ordinances, the socalled plakaatboeken. In January 2020 the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Dutch national library, published at KB LAB, its digital humanities platform, the results of the project Entangled Histories: Ordinances of the Low Countries. For a very particular ty ..read more

Sometimes events can seem rather unique, but historians have been trained to be wary of this claim. Since weeks the city state Hong Kong is in the grip of political turmoil. The legal and political status and future of this special administrative region in China is at the core of the disputes and actions. It is not a new idea to look at the law of both Hong Kong and Macau together, but I decided to add a third town in South East Asia to the comparison in this post. What have these city states in common apart from their geographical situation around a harbor? In this post I will look at a numbe ..read more

After six months I should finally fulfill my promise to honor here at least once a year the role of Roman law. You might almost call it the mother of all legal history! Luckily I found a subject close to current interests. Water as a vital element of life was not absent in Roman law. Its presence is in fact manifold. The project Roman Water Law at the Freie Universität and the Humboldt Universität in Berlin helps to look at regulation concerning water and its uses according to an interesting scheme. Legal attention to water has a very long history ..read more

Last month I wanted to refresh my blog roll. Among the new additions is a project for a new editions of laws created by a king with perhaps the best reputation of all medieval kings, at least in modern perception. Alfonso il Sabio - or Alfonso X - of Castile wrote the songs of the Cantigas de Maria and he created a famous law collection, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts). For a new critical edition of this collection the Spanish team of editors have created the blog 7 Partidas Digital: Edición critica de las Siete Partidas. In this post I will look at this project and I will try provi ..read more

Sometimes you might think that all legal materials for Roman law do fit into the volumes of the Corpus Iuris Civilis. Some scholars will use for the oldest laws the Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani, but there you reach the outer limits of the world of Roman law. However, in facts things are rather different. French scholars will shortly launch a database for researching Roman laws and their history. Their fresh and thoughtful approach might well rekindle interest in the way Romans gave themselves laws. The database is already up and running, and this post offers the first glimpses of it ..read more

The freedom of bloggers is not something you should take for granted. In some countries of the world blogging is really dangerous because governments are not at all at ease about the freedom to express oneself. Last week it was exactly 250 years ago that Sweden saw the first legislation for freedom of print. In Sweden and Finland special websites gave been launched to celebrate this commemoration. In this post I would like to look briefly at the celebrations, at eighteenth-century Sweden and the impact of this act of legislation ..read more