The main focus of this forum lies on the specifically European context of the CRC in historical, geographical and cultural terms. While "law and literature" is an established movement within the Anglo-American context, the European research on law and literature has so far not managed to achieve a similar magnitude, which the CRC hopes to change. At the same time, law and literature-research on the European continent also needs to disintegrate itself from the Anglo-American movement at least in the sense that the focus should shift significantly to a European cultural context. Research from the Anglo-American movement are simply not easily 'translatable' to a European context due to cultural and historical, but also due to political reasons. The CRC therefore aligns itself in academic terms with the existent Anglo-American research on law and literature, but aims at a 'European turn' within the movement. This is not only due to the very significant differences between legal systems and jurisdictions, but also because of different traditions of legal practice. The CRC hopes to include the particularities of a continental European position in the discussion and include Britain in this context. This also allows a perspective on 19th- and 20th-century research on law and literature, which was more often than not composed in German, and accordingly has received relatively little attention. Thus, the CRC seeks to build a bridge between a specifically European perspective on law and literature and the Anglo-American law-and-literature movement. This includes first a focus on the existent legal frame of dominant European legislation and jurisdiction (public and private law in the French, German and Scandinavian tradition and the common law) and its historical development concerning natural law, ecclesiastical law, Islamic and Jewish religious law, Soviet-law etc. Second, the forum places its emphasis also on methodological and theoretical aspects as well as on the theory of science, which shall all reflect upon continental European and Anglo-American concepts of law in relation to literary works and ideologies of literature.
