Third edition of glossary published
The "Münster Glossary on Legal Unity and Pluralism" has been published in a third edition, once again significantly expanded and available in open access. New contributions cover topics like social norms, the concept of citizenship, and privileges in ancient law.
The glossary brings together articles on important concepts, and covers terms and phenomena from the research fields of legal unity and pluralism. As a central collaborative project of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, it is being successively expanded by its fellows and research associates as well as external contributors. The third edition now comprises 38 lemmas in German and English. Reflecting the different academic backgrounds of the authors, the contributions open up very different perspectives on legal pluralism, a research field which is becoming increasingly confusing. The glossary is intended to serve as a tool that provides a quick overview of the central concepts and categories of the various disciplines involved. It aims to reduce barriers to understanding, particularly in interdisciplinary dialogue.
A distinctive feature of the glossary is its focus on past eras and societies, which places legal pluralism – a phenomenon often mistakenly regarded as purely contemporary – in a broader historical context. For example, there is a lemma on the ancient Roman Constitutio Antoniniana, an edict issued by the Emperor Caracalla that granted Roman citizenship to all free individuals of the Empire. Yet, what is often understood as an act of legal standardisation had a rather limited effect, at least with regard to curbing local rights, as the article shows. Other contributions deal, for example, with Lex Mercatoria – customary rules for cross-border trade that can be found both in the Middle Ages and in modern times – or the so-called Statutenkollisionslehre, a doctrine with which pre-modern jurists attempted to come to grips with the plurality of competing local customary laws.
The Glossary is published twice a year in expanded editions as part of the EViR Working Papers (ISSN: 2749-8166 (print), 2749-8174 (online)) and is freely available in open access. It is planned to publish the entire glossary in print at a later date.
Bibliographical reference:
Münsteraner Glossar zu Einheit und Vielfalt im Recht | Münster Glossary on Legal Unity and Pluralism
3rd Edition (Last revision: October 2023)
EViR Working Paper 6
Keywords: legal history; legal pluralism; legal unity; interdisciplinary understanding
DOI: 10.17879/98998690804
URN: urn:nbn:de:hbz:6-98998692393