Conference on “Exception and Plurality in Pre-Modern Law"

The conference series on legal exception and plurality will continue from 7 to 9 September. After last year’s focus was on Roman law in antiquity, this time the focus is on the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

“It was only the modern nation states that achieved the large-scale enforcement of uniform law. The claims to validity of very different authorities still overlapped in the early modern period. We can therefore observe legal pluralism here”, explains legal historian and Kolleg research professor Dr. Gregor Albers, who is organising the conference together with Prof. Dr. Peter Oestmann. However, this view is not the only one possible. Research also depicts the pre-modern period as a time when there was an excess of legal exceptions. However, where there are exceptions, so there must also be a rule, i.e. a uniform legal order. “This insight invites us to look more closely at the significance of the exception for medieval and early modern law”, says Albers. “In particular, we will look at how the evaluation of a legal proposition as an exception made law more diverse on the one hand, while making it possible to grasp divergent phenomena as part of one system on the other”.

The four conference sections cover dogmatics as well as procedural practice. In addition, the focus is on the granting of privileges as well as local rights as exceptions to common law. The third part of the conference series will deal next year with exception and plurality in modern law.

The conference programme and registration can be found here.