Post-doctoral candidates

From the end of the 19^th Century, the organisation of societal interests intensified in non-state institutions, albeit often those closely linked to the state. Their roles were manifold: the creation of regulations and guidelines, social and financial self-help, ensuring education and quality standards, ensuring professional discipline, sometimes implementing the sovereign authority of the state. To a large extent, however, self-regulation institutions also acted as institutions in which conflicts were argued out in a formal process – conflicts which were not delivered to state jurisdiction or in which the state only acted as a secondary authority. Usually operating as resolution, arbitration or conciliation boards, these institutions had a variety of forms: They could be located within an existing organisation (e.g. courts of arbitration in professional associations) or created for conflicts between different organisations (e.g. arbitration boards for disputes resulting from deficiency contracts between the umbrella organisations of banks, building societies and credit unions) or be set up by the authorities but staffed by representatives of societal groups (e.g. rental arbitration offices).

Although familiar, these forms of conflict resolution have so far hardly been appraised from the point of view of legal history.

The project is designed to close this research gap and examine this kind of institution, including as an alternative model to the state monopoly on jurisdiction (and to the administrative state monopoly on decision-making). The most attention will be paid to the question of the extent to which, through the way such institutions functioned, the interaction between the state’s ambitions of control and the efforts of sectors of society to maintain self-organisation were realised.

In the first year, the contemporary literature will be reviewed and parliamentary material and printed administrative arbitration material will be evaluated, predominantly in Frankfurt and the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin). In the second year, the investigation will be deepened to include some selected forms of arbitration through archive research, predominantly in the Ge­heimes Staatsarchiv Berlin-Dahlem, archives of bodies which maintained arbitration institutions and regional archives. The third year will be used for evaluation and to compile the publication.

City unrest was a widespread phenomenon which was seen frequently in Europe in the Early Modern Era. The basic constellation of the conflicts behind it can, in many cases, be described by the formula “council vs. citizens”, although it was not uncommon for both the council and the citizens to be internally divided, too. Conflict could be triggered by religious differences, complaints about mismanagement and corruption or even differing views on the basic rules of the political community. While city councils increasingly saw themselves as independent authorities and demanded obedience accordingly, many citizens saw the council more in the position of a trustee or representative of interests in relation to the actual town lords (imperial princes or emperors). Furthermore, the citizens assumed that the council was accountable to them. Where these demands were not met, a range of protest forms, right up to armed resistance, could be the result.

Following up on the concept of ‘juridification’ developed in historical research, the question of how the methods used to settle these kinds of conflicts changed between the 16^th and 18^th Centuries will be investigated. For a long time, conflicts between the council and citizens continued to be initially settled through internal conciliation or the involvement of external mediators; these methods were never totally abandoned. However, as the 17^th Century progressed, imperial commissions or the Aulic Council become involved more and more often, while the Imperial Chamber Court also displayed an increase in activity in this field.

A particular focus of this project will be on analysing the courses of action selected by the participants (or prescribed by external factors?) and on interpreting the political and legal patterns of argument used in this. In which cases did the use of a citizens’ panel, for example, prove functional and effective, and in which cases did it not? Is it possible to identify specific factors which can be seen as crucial for success or failure? Which normative concepts ultimately explained the behaviour of all those involved? These questions are to be answered using the widest possible source base, while concentrating on a few selected case studies.

The project will investigate the interdependencies between customs of reprehension and legal regulations both in legal practice and from a dogmatic point of view in Republican and Principate Rome. Customs of reprehension are collaborative actions against individual members of the same group who sanction incorrect behaviour through libel and thus want to achieve correction of the behaviour and reintegration into the group. They are traditionally defined, ritual processes, such as house desertion, the application of symbols of disgrace, and the singing of defamatory songs.

Literary sources contain a series of indications of the existence of customs of reprehension in Rome. Legal sources, probably in varying degrees, reflect both the incorporation of customs of reprehension into the law and their sanctioning. Neither group of sources has yet been used for the questions to be pursued here. The extent to which customs of reprehension were accepted by or integrated into the law, and offences and crimes and their processes and sanctions were formed along the lines of customs of reprehension, is to be investigated. On another level, the development and causistics of the facts, legal consequences and processes of some offences (e.g. the iniuria as a “violation of personality”) will be investigated to find out the extent to which they represent a reaction to practices of reprehension by seeking to legally prevent their practice. It must therefore be investigated to what extent the conflict resolution processes passed down in the customs of reprehension were “juridified”, whether and how judicial processes came into conflict with the customs of reprehension. On the other hand, reprehension practices themselves are to be investigated as the object of judicial proceedings.

All in all, the investigation will revolve around the term ‘honour’, the social and legal fields on which conflicts of honour occurred and were resolved, and finally the relationship between social and legal, judicial and extrajudicial strategies for their resolution.