“Freedom through justice” is the motto under which the Gesellschaft für Reichskammergerichtsforschung has summarised the highest court. It is intended to express that the court, founded as a reaction to a comprehensive ban on feuding, offered a real alternative to controversial conflict resolution. The Imperial Chamber Court thus, for the first time, offered subjects the opportunity to force their rulers before the court.

In this context, in 1975, Winfrid Schulze formulated the hypothesis that social and political disputes were “juridified” after the peasants’ revolt in 1525. Statistical evidence on the Imperial Chamber Court confirms this hypothesis, allowing Filippo Ranieri to find that proceedings in the Chamber Court initiated by subjects against their rulers increased in the late 16^th Century. Between 1587 and 1589, they account for almost 8% of all cases.[2] This trend continued in the subsequent centuries. A particularly high number of villages filed complaints in the first forty years after the Thirty Years War. This proportion fell in the 18^th Century. There are just a few peaks in the periods between 1730 and 1739 and between 1790 and 1799, probably as a reaction to the French Revolution.

If nothing else, this information was sufficient encouragement to bring about a whole series of investigations into cases brought by subjects.[4] However, this research also shows that not all actors restricted themselves to the legal process, but instead that some developed a considerable repertoire of peaceful, and sometimes violent, means of asserting their interests. The route to court depended on many factors, such as the general readiness to use violence and trust in the jurisdiction, as well as the organisation of the court process, the duration, its costs, the enforceability, the contact to the Emperor or the geopolitical situation in the smaller territories etc., or indeed on the specific circumstances, which could have offered alternative routes to conflict resolution. Judicial and extrajudicial conflict resolution was sometimes carried out at the same time. Bernhard Diestelkamp’s studies on the community of Freienseen and its dispute with Count von Solms-Laubach show that the content of the rulings of the Imperial Chamber Court were only accepted following a settlement concluded in Marburg in 1639, since only this settlement corresponded to both the will of the Count and that of the community. Diestelkamp can also show that direct application to the Emperor was a not infrequently used, albeit ineffective, method used by the subjects to attempt to influence the jurisdiction of a court.

In the case of urban conflicts, too, pacification was usually achieved not only through a court decision, but not until a settlement was reached between the council and the citizens, although this could not have been concluded without intervention from the Imperial Chamber Court and sometimes the Aulic Council and the commissions appointed.

The observations show that an extensive repertoire of both judicial and extrajudicial options for conflict resolution was available. Indeed, the two types were often mixed. In order that this can be presented accurately and, at the same time, to ensure comparability with all other sub-projects, the investigation is to be led by the following questions:

Firstly, questions must be asked about the number and backgrounds of the actors. The question of the costs which had to be paid for the dispute must then be clarified. Who was prepared to pay and how did they pay? What was the role played by the poor law, introduced by the Imperial Chamber Court as early as 1495?

This is followed by the questions: How long did the process take? How sustainable was conflict resolution? Who checked that the rulings were enforced efficiently? What conditions were required for all actors to accept the rulings?

Forms of the extrajudicial dispute culture must also be taken into account. For example, there was passive resistance on the part of the subjects, the use of violence on the part of the rulers, and various options for involving the media. Another essential question is therefore, which forms of enforcement were available to whom? And how were they put into practice?

A bibliography of cases brought by subjects will be compiled to form a basis which will then be used to develop an initial grid of the various options for action available. The quantity of data can be increased later through targeted archive studies. In this, it must be noted that judicial conflict resolution has left a great many broad tracks in the archives, while extrajudicial alternatives tend to be found more by chance.

Further problems and difficulties will present themselves in the definition of terms. How “extrajudicial routes to conflict resolution” in the pre-modern period can be defined must therefore be checked.

The objective is to compare the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the longevity or volatility, of the rulings found between subjects and rulers when using courts or other routes to conflict resolution. The ultimate question is: Peace through justice – at what cost?

The vast majority of sources on the law of merchants in the Middle Ages are procedural rules. Relevant terms such as ius mercatorum, lex mercatoria etc. are almost always found in the context of the special status of merchants before the courts. This is predominantly seen in the simplification of evidence procedures, arrangements for oath taking, the length and acceleration, and effective enforcement and legal remedy.

Significantly less information is found about the many alternatives to judicial disputes. One often finds out only indirectly or coincidentally about the termination of business relationships, stretching to trade boycotts, attempts to damage opponents by damaging their reputation or positioning the authorities against them, or attempts at mediation and resolution by mutual friends or relatives.

The project will examine the procedural features given from the perspective of the 'justice user', the merchant in the conflict, by investigating how the structure of the court proceedings affects the decision of the merchant in the dispute between judicial and extrajudicial means of asserting his interests. When was which means of asserting interests more attractive and for whom? How did court proceedings have to be organised in order for merchants to entrust their interests to them, and in what ways did merchants make efforts to arrange court proceedings in their own interests?

During the first six months of the project, the alternatives to judicial resolution named will be identified more precisely in the sources and then categorised. The aim is to form empirically-based ideal types of extrajudicial options for conflict resolution in mercantile law. In the second phase (18 months), a series of comparative investigations into central questions of court organisation and proceedings in various jurisdictions which have addressed mercantile matters will be placed in front of this benchmark and constantly measured against it. This includes responsibility, the staffing of the court, days of hearing, the duration and costs of the trial, how outsiders are treated, especially concerning the rules of evidence, enforcement and finally legal remedy. The third phase (1 year) will be used to compile the results and write them up as a longer essay or a chapter in a monograph which has been planned for some time.

The overlapping spheres of church and secular jurisdiction offered significant space for the strategic use of processes in the Early Modern Age. This is also because both secular and church institutions were available for resolving disputes; in turn, within this church jurisdiction, alongside the courts whose procedural rules tended to be stricter, there were also other forums and processes, such as visitations or church assemblies. However, little attention has so far been paid to the jurisdictional function of these processes (cf. with further references Duve 2010). Furthermore, it is also noticeable that there were often severe, and sometimes even violent, disputes not only between, but also within, these spheres. This indicates that conflict and dealing with opposing interests was a constituent part of a culture of conflict in the Early Modern Age.

Using so far little exploited archive material around the provincial councils of the 16^th Century in Mexico and Peru – in particular the extremely important Third Councils (1582/83 and 1585) – conflict resolution practices used by church institutions, cases in which church jurisdiction was used, their close interweaving with secular institutions and possible reasons for conflict resolutions will be reconstructed.

It is planned that the first eight months of the work will focus on viewing and reviewing the literature and the already extensively printed sources; in the second phase of the work (16 months), this basis will be used to carry out evaluative work and archive research in Spanish (AGI) and other archives (predominantly in Mexico). Particular emphasis will be put on carving out in particular types of conflicts, arguments for the use of the institutions in question and possible motives, in dialogue with other associated projects. The third year will be spent on formulation and writing up.

As a consequence of the Reformation, marital law was stripped of both its basic standards and its jurisdiction, previously exercised by the Catholic bishops, by Martin Luther’s rejection of canonic law. General jurisdiction in Saxony also found itself undergoing a radical transformation at this time due to the introduction of the law of letters. Over a decade passed between the Reformation and the reorganisation of the first manorial court in Electoral Saxony, and it was another decade before a special marital court was established. Against this background, very different problem-solving approaches for conflicts in marital law can be observed between 1517 and 1580. It is particularly interesting that the powerful early modern territorial state does not appear to have exhausted the options available for enacting and enforcing standards. Before the right to become an Elector changed in the middle of the century, no substantive basic standards were created, nor was a comprehensive court system initially established.

These observations lead to two questions which are key for the sub-project. Firstly, whether the state increased the potential for conflict by enacting standards must be investigated. The second question is whether, in asserting state interests, singular significance is automatically given not to a stronger authority, but to a high quality of conflict resolution options offered by the state.

The role of this project is to use the sources of early Protestant marital law to verify these hypotheses and to measure them against the research results of other periods and cultural areas. Conflict causes and resolution strategies will be investigated for similarities and differences on an abstract level, in order to gain systematic insights into strategy patterns which apply across geographical and temporal boundaries.

After developing a research strategy based on the relevant archive material on early Protestant marital law already found for earlier publications in the first half of 2012, around 18 months of archive research will be carried out in the main state archives in Wei­mar, Dresden and Magdeburg, as well as in other selected archives of the cities and smaller territories in Sachsen. The final year will be spent evaluating and compiling the material found for publication.

For a pre-modern period, Hellenic Egypt offers an unusual wealth of sources for the investigation of questions regarding extrajudicial and judicial conflict resolution. The Hellenic period is also of interest because it is similar to today in many respects. Today's experience of the limits of the nation state finds its equivalent in the replacement of the classical polis structure by monarchical territorial states and of the multicultural civilisation characteristic of Hellenism.

It was not only the population structure of Hellenic Egypt which was heterogeneous, with Egyptians on one side and Greeks and other nationalities on the other. The organisation of the courts was just as complex as the population structure and even more nuanced than Ptolemaic law. It has now been firmly established in research that, at least at times, each population group had its own courts; specifically, the Egyptians the Laocrites and the Greeks the Dicasterians. However, this does not fully represent the organisation of courts in Ptolemaic Egypt. Wolff's (1970) hypotheses may have met with approval in legal history research (Modrzejewski 1988), but have recently been strongly criticised from an Egyptology point of view (Lippert 2008).

The conflict resolution behaviour of Greek-speaking society in Egypt is to be mapped using a wide range of legal protection applications to various authorities (courts, civil servants, in later period even bishops) and using the few royal rulings handed down to the court organisation.

Initially, the key question will be whether the state intervenes in the variety of existing conflict resolution bodies only when there is external pressure and whether the issue is otherwise left to self-organisation. The idea is to define competences and, if possible, to fix collision standards in the context of reorganisation measures following unrest. Finally, it will be clarified whether there are matters which are reserved for and only handled by a specific type of court (e.g. criminal justice).

The initial objective at this stage is envisioned to be the compilation of a body of sources (2012), followed by the presentation of initial results at an international conference (2013). Finally, a manuscript will be completed in 2014.

Clauses regarding pactum de non petendo or the non-rescission of contracts are part of the standard repertoire of forms for business documents and process protocols throughout the entire three-thousand-year history of cunieform legal tradition.

Despite many extensive investigations, the modes of operation and significance of the pactum de non petendo clauses still appear not to have been fully clarified. The subject of discussion might be, for instance, the (older) explanatory model of an arbitration agreement with reference to a judicial dispute termination proposal compared to the newer hypothesis of protection of a judge’s ruling in its claim to validity using the preclusion effect of the pactum de non petendo clauses. Both approaches focus almost exclusively on the process documents, largely failing to take the practice of the attested transactions into account.

The central question is therefore directed at understanding the coexistence of and possible interaction between pactum de non petendo clauses in the two types of text and thus at the earliest written evidence of judicial and extrajudicial conflict resolution in the history of mankind. Because, in addition, there are no surviving normative texts on this phenomenon, the question also arises of whether pectum de non petendo is based on a legal custom with normative effect which grew out of legal practice, which also targets the fundamental question of how the law came into existence as a conflict resolution mechanism.

The relevant surviving cunieform case and contractual documents will first be recorded and evaluated, followed by an eight-month conception phase for specifying the investigation process and the relevant body of sources (16 months). Most of the appropriate source editions are available in Frankfurt, although the predicted timeframe will also allow texts to be collated in the relevant museums where appropriate. The last year will be used exclusively for writing up the investigation for publication. Between the second and third steps, there will be an opportunity to include international specialist colleagues, such as in the form of a symposium or similar event.

Research into Europe’s urban history in the Early Modern Age (16^th/17^th Centuries) has led to a number of reappraisals in recent decades. This also includes a comparative European investigation into strategies for the resolution of urban conflict and unrest from the mid-16^th to late 17^th Century. One research tradition of the 1970s characterised this as ‘juridification’; this work was predominantly based on studies on the urban history of the Old Kingdom.

In contrast, work concerned with the implementation of legal penal standards (including) in cities in the Early Modern Age have found that the provisions were hardly noticed on the ground, because urban standards worked against them.

The question is, therefore, whether there was an intention of juridification which was never put into practice, because traditional resolution strategies without institutionalised court processes were better able to assert themselves. Their structures, processes and legitimacy must be analysed; only then can we judge whether there was really a contradiction between ‘modern juridification’ and ‘traditional legal processes’ without connection to modern legal proceedings.

This approach consciously breaks away from the established development model, which states that all pre-state models of order offered lower chances of success in the resolution of conflicts. Instead, the project presented here is concerned with the time-specific functionality of conflict resolution models; the benchmark for evaluation is explicitly not the standards of national finding of justice in the 19^th Century.

The research must concentrate on selected types of city in Europe. The planned cities therefore include two imperial cities, one Hanseatic city and a city at the intersection of European developments (e.g. Gdansk, Amsterdam). At the start of the project, five cities will be defined. The first phase of the work (12 months) will be used firstly to develop the city-specific investigations and secondly to view the records in the city archives and create a database, into which the archive materials deemed relevant will be entered in the form of regestas. In the second phase (12 months), the questions will be analysed using the records viewed and the research literature, and the research hypothesis corrected if necessary. The third phase (12 months) will be used to write up the results of the investigation and develop comparative aspects with specialist colleagues; this will be used as the foundation of a monograph which will be compiled comparatively for all five city types.

Although thought so for many years, the 16^th Century is not so much a phase of decline for Hanseatic history, but a phase of transition, in which the most important parameters of the Hanseatic League’s late Medieval trading system shifted predominantly as the result of the rise of the Northern European kingdoms and, following the discovery of America, the economic focuses in Europe moved westwards. This endangered the Hanseatic bases abroad, known as trading stations. London’s ‘Stalhof’ with its customs privileges was repeatedly at the centre of disputes with the Hanseatic competition, the London Merchant Adventurers. The conflict broke into the open when the Hanseatic League wanted to renew their old privileges again in the middle of the 16^th Century. Both sides used political, diplomatic and legal means, giving current relevance in trade policy to the seemingly purely academic question of the legal nature of the Hanseatic League.

The project will collect the legal assessments, commissioned by both sides, in the archives, publish them in a single edition and evaluate them. The key question in this will be how the traditional criteria and methods of argumentation of the ius commune, on which both sides relied, were shaped and made useful for objectives in trade policy (retention or elimination of old Hanseatic privileges). Also to be investigated is the role played by this assessment war in the general framework of the dispute, and the relative significance of this (dearly bought) instrument for conflict resolution.

At the start of the first year, the project will continue the collection work in the Hanseatic archives from Cologne to Gdansk begun during the DFG-Mercator guest professorship of Alain Wijffels with Albrecht Cordes in Frankfurt in the winter semester of 2010/11. The assessments, some of which have only hidden references in the archives’ repertories, will be found and transcribed. From the second half of the first year to the end of the second, the focus will be on evaluation in terms of the aspects named; a lot of time must be scheduled for identifying the allegations (i.e. the literature quoted). At the end of the second year, a specialist conference will be held, which will bring together two groups of researchers which are otherwise totally unconnected, the experts in ius commune and the Hanseatic historians, in order to assist in better understanding of these texts. The third year will be taken up with the publication of the collection of essays resulting from this conference and preparation of the edition which could be used as an introduction to the evaluation by the two leaders of the sub-project.

In imperial China, it was important in a Confucian sense to propagate a feeling for 'ethically' correct behaviour and to prevent conflicts through societal rituals, in order "to prevent what can happen when the law makes no effort to prevent what has already happened". This was not only a theoretical construct; this aim was expressed particularly clearly in Chinese common law.

There has so far been no comprehensive historical investigation into conflict prevention and conflict resolution in China in the late Imperial Era.

This project is intended to contribute to closing this gap. Initially, the key material of the investigation will be sources which give information on moral and ethical indoctrination, i.e. above all the Xiangyue itself and its significance for the local communities, as described by Huang Liuhong and in the writings of other officials during the Qing period, for example. In this way, Xiangyue and shengyu are understood not only as a largely inefficient method of ideological indoctrination, but will first be perceived as a means of conflict resolution, of whose effectiveness a considerable number of people were convinced.

Once the writings have been assessed during the first year, the second step (approx. 13 months) will be to investigate whether and to what extent this assumption was correct. Finally, an attempt will be made to find evidence of attempts at extrajudicial conflict resolution in specific legal cases and to integrate these into the larger project. This approach is based on the assumption that many conflicts should have been settled through mediation by middlemen or relatives before they came to a head and led to murder. In this context, it will be particularly interesting to see what role was played by the heads of the Xiangyue, who are named very frequently in the documents. The files of court cases will therefore be read essentially against the grain and searched for information on conflict resolution. In this, use will be made of both collections of documents and of the original documents accessible in the archives in China and Taiwan, which will be visited in the second year of the project.

In the final step (13 months), an attempt will be made to gain access to files in local archives and to assess these with regard to the question of conflict prevention. A report of results will be compiled at the end of the third year.

The USA displays a greater density of extrajudicial dispute resolution systems than Germany. At the same time, there are fundamental differences between the judicial arbitration structures and processes.

Legal proceedings in the USA, for example, have no obligation for reimbursement of expenses for the unsuccessful party, the financial viability threshold is high, and pre-trial discovery causes significant costs, lengthens the process considerably and brings with it far-reaching additional obligations. On the other hand, the levels of expertise and acceptance of judges’ decision-making processes are very high. Germany displays clear cost and especially time benefits in court proceedings in comparison.

Do the time factor and cost aspects in Germany hinder extrajudicial prosecution? What are the factors behind the fact that the USA has a greater density of extrajudicial dispute resolution systems than the Federal Republic of Germany?

This investigation is intended to shed light on the decision-making structures and processes in the USA from a historical point of view, in particular for the period from the late 19^th Century to today.

In the first seven months, the judicial decision-making structures in the USA and Germany will be reviewed from a legal comparison point of view using literature and legislation. In the following fifteen months, the available documents will be used to examine the criteria for and mechanisms of extrajudicial dispute resolution. Research and interviews for this are planned to take place in the USA at the end of the first year. The remaining time will be used to put the results into writing.

日本の特徴として訴訟の少なさ、そしてそれに関連して裁判外紛争解決メカニズムの(必ずしも不断とはいえないまでも)長い伝統をあげることができる。 このことは過去においては合意による紛争解決の文化的傾向の表れとして考えられ、そしてそれは少なからず肯定的に評価されてきた。 これに対して、司法改革審議会は2001年に、争訟手続の少なさは紛争当事者の文化的特質よりもむしろ日本の司法の構造的な欠陥に原因を有するとの見方に少なくとも部分的には同調する見解を示した。 現在、総合的な司法改革により裁判と裁判外紛争解決のあらたな関係の構図が描かれている。 そこでは裁判へのアクセスと裁判上の手続を改善する一方、裁判外紛争解決の伝統的な諸要素の強化が図られている。 裁判外紛争解決の強化に関しては特にADR法(裁判外紛争手続の利用の促進に関する法律)が2007年に新たに制定され、それによりADR認証制度が導入された。

本プロジェクトは、日本におけるADR制度の変遷、その新たな訴訟法上の諸領域での作用および効果を調査研究することを目的とする。

日本の経験事例が示すのは、裁判外紛争解決メカニズムは国家の司法の能力および欠陥に関連するかたちで発展すると言うものである。 本プロジェクトは昨近の日本の司法改革を、裁判外紛争解決にかんする非常に豊富な経験を有する国における裁判と裁判外紛争解決の関係を見通すレンズとして研究をすすめる。 研究にあたっては、法令、立法資料、文献特に日本語文献を使用し、研究者そして実務家との会談・討議等も行う。

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.

According to the classical view, litigation predominantly serves to assert relatively well-defined legal positions within the relative relationship between the litigator and defendant. From this point of view, uncertainties and risks result as part of the process predominantly from a real point of view, and are then managed through the rules governing the taking of evidence and the burden of proof. However, the reality of litigation today corresponds to this idea only in part. Complex and multi-polar conflicts are increasingly becoming the subject of litigation, and thus do not correspond to the typical image of a two-party case, as well as leading to uncertainty regarding which legal position can be attributed to each party involved. Another aspect linked to this is the function played by the courts in the development of the law, which is becoming ever more important, especially at high judicial levels, and within which the jurisdiction not only applies standards, but creates them itself without the content of these standards being able to be predicted with any certainty.

This multi-faceted image of jurisdiction also poses the question of appropriate financing for litigation. In particular when the object of the case refers to multi-polar legal positions or legal positions whose details still have to be defined, the case involves financial risks which the parties involved in the case can hardly be reasonably expected to bear. Instead, one option is to pass the risks on to professional actors who are better able to control or safeguard the potential for uncertainty.

In this context, this sub-project will investigate what role third-party financing of litigation through an external financer can play in releasing the litigant from the financial risks of a legal dispute and carries the promise of a portion of the litigant’s gain in return if the case is successful. This is a business model which has been practised in the USA for some time and which is gaining in significance in other countries (such as Australia and now Germany, too). Its great practical relevance has triggered a discussion of whether this third-party financing is an expansion of ‘access to justice’ which should be welcomed or rather an instrument which is open to abuse and which encourages the one-sided assertion of particular interests within the legal system. This sub-project will take up this discussion, investigating the incentive effect of third-party financing from an academic perspective and, from a legal perspective, providing more detail on the influence on the problem held by the different legal and institutional conditions. The main goal of the project is thus to create an interface between an academic and an economic viewpoint on litigation financing and to use this foundation to allow interdisciplinary transfer of knowledge and dialogue on the functional conditions of judicial conflict resolution.

The results of this sub-project will be presented to both an academic and a legal audience through journal articles.

In contrast to most ‘modern’ European countries, which had legal review systems with relatively clear geographical or subject-related responsibilities by the 19^th Century, in England, competition persisted between courts which could rule on similar cases in accordance with the rules of common law (King‘s Bench) or ‘justice’ (Chancery, Exchequer). This offered potential prosecutors the opportunity to choose between extrajudicial conflict resolution and various courts, which appeared to offer reliability, speed and ‘justice’ to a greater or lesser extent.

Using legal, journalistic and perhaps biographical sources, the project will attempt to clarify what made various conflict resolution mechanisms more attractive, when and for whom.

The extensive tradition of the equity courts, locked up in various archives and previously little evaluated, makes it possible to investigate many questions which are relevant to the project as a whole within a broad historical horizon:

Which features make a particular form of conflict resolution (un)attractive? What do conflict resolutions have to look like in order for the loser to see them as legitimate? How do forms of extrajudicial conflict resolution have to look so that they do not come into conflict with claims to uniformity and sovereignty in the medium to long term?

The first year will be used to review the literature and the presentation of common law and equity proceedings in the press (accessible in Frankfurt for the 19^th Century), in pamphlets (accessible in Frankfurt for the 18^th Century) and in parliamentary reports (accessible in Frankfurt). Entirely extrajudicial conflict resolution mechanisms will also be searched for. Following this, in the second year, archive research will be undertaken in England and a specialist conference may be organised. Finally, the report on the results will be compiled in the third year.

From the perspective of business and economic history, the time starting from around 1880 was characterised by a high concentration of national and international businesses. Business combinations, such as in the form of pools, syndicates or trusts, have not only an almost unlimited legal structure of their organisation to thank for their existence. They also began increasingly to use rules of arbitration and arbitration proceedings, as well as comparative and coexistence agreements, to resolve conflicts outside the state courts. Right up to today, it remains unclear when companies in cartels used or avoided state courts, whether and how they argued out, negotiated and decided their internal conflicts in the latter case, which principles and rules were used for this and how and by whom decisions were made. The cartel office of the Reichsverband der deutschen Industrie (RdI), which was able to decide in conflicts between companies from 1920, gives first indications of conflicts being resolved largely outside the state courts. However, considerably more significant was conflict management within the cartels themselves, such as in the form of specific arbitration and process regulations.

The following individual project will investigate the actors, legal remedies and processes of the specific conflict resolution mechanisms within this kind of cartel as an alternative model to the state monopoly on jurisdiction. In terms of time, the sub-project concentrates on the interwar years, when cartelisation reached a peak in Germany. In order to keep the image as enclosed as possible, it is necessary to analyse significant cases, such as in company archives. The key sources for this will be the collections of Siemens AG on Osram in Munich, the Bergbauarchiv Bochum for the Rheinisch-Westfälische Kohlensyndikat, the Deutsches Technik-Museum in Berlin for Telefunken and the archive of the former Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie A.G. in Frankfurt am Main.

The project is divided into three phases. Its first eight-month section will involve researching and recording twelve significant processes based on the surviving sources. In a second eight-month section, the material collected will be evaluated and analysed, in order that, in the final phase of the project, it can be presented at a conference and perhaps published.

With the help of the law, conflicts can be solved through agreement, mediation and reconciliation, or by a court with the power of enforcement. It was not only due to a lack of state jurisdiction and supremacy of autonomous authorities that ‘settlement’ generally came before ‘judgement’ from the Middle Ages until the saddle period around 1800. Settlement and mediation were constantly and consistently preferred in the guild and trade ‘courts‘, in guilds and chambers of commerce, in the English movement for conciliation and arbitration instead of strike or even judge and then in continental Europe, too, from the late 19^th Century, then in wage agreements and labour secretariats from around 1900, conciliation and settlement and forced settlement in the Weimar Republic, in the so-called conciliatory proceedings in industrial tribunal proceedings from 1926, including in the personnel par features of the highest industrial tribunals.

It therefore seems a logical course of action to investigate the process of and reasons behind this noticeably consistent affinity with informal judicial solutions for conflicts in the world of work.

The first task must be to clarify the extent to which the alternative to state jurisdiction really existed and was accessible. Typologically, the key is the great contrast between procedural law ‘without the state’ and ‘with the state’. In both types, there are fundamental differences between the process initiatives, the roles of the judges, the legal concepts, the means of evidence, the structure of the proceedings, the objectives of the proceedings, the force of the court and the enforcement; in short, the entire constellation. Five large sections will be defined for phase formation: (1) the medieval party process, (2) the Roman-canonical taught process with gradual nationalisation, (3) the constitutional response to the general nationalisation through a new judiciary and process constitution in the late 18^th/19^th Century, including new constitutional protection instruments such as administrative and constitutional courts, (4) the National Socialist process 1933-1945 with general relaxation and ideological control using new instruments, (5) the current phase of modern constitutional litigation since 1945.

Specifically, it must then be determined which alternatives actually existed for conflicts, which were used and which were not, and why.

Around ten months will be needed for analysis of the sources and literature, especially if at least England and France are to be included, which would be desirable. The following 14 months will be used to order the sources and develop the concept for the written work, which will be presented in a monograph in the final year.

The fact that no judge traditionally stands above the states has always had international law searching for its own methods of conflict resolution. Taking the law into one's own hands (all the way to war and armed intervention) and arbitration proceedings were supposed to solve disputes between states where diplomacy was no longer enough. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, a tendency towards not only the juridication of conflict resolution in international law, but also towards the stabilisation and sectoral institutionalisation of international courts, can be seen.

The objective of this project is to trace the lines of development of modern legal history and to achieve a historic typology of conflict resolution mechanisms in international law. In this, a particular focus is on the history of science of international law: How did this science see and systematise the conflicts and how did it conceptualise solutions? It is not only the deficits compared to state institutional conflict resolution which are to be seen; in fact the very opposite. This is because the historical experience that conflicts between powers are particularly difficult to solve has led to international law producing a rich fundus of other instruments. In a way, these work complementarily and upstream of the dispute resolution mechanisms which only take effect once a conflict has already broken out. It remains to be clarified whether this can be seen as 'conflict resolution', whether one can really talk optimistically of 'peaceful accommodation' and 'settlement', or whether it isn't in fact just 'arguing out' (perhaps even with the chance of intensifying the situation).

In the first half of 2012, a research strategy will be compiled for the sources in international law (predominantly accessible in Frankfurt in the MPIeR). From this, an initial typology of conflicts and resolution options will be developed over the next almost 18 months. The results will be written up in the third year.

In the United States, ADR, and in particular the institution of mediation in its various forms, has forced litigious legal proceedings into the background in certain categories (e.g. for small values in disputes not suitable for class action). This development is due to the systematic weaknesses of the state jurisdiction. The assertion "that extrajudicial dispute resolution mechanisms always develop dependant on the performance and deficits of state justice" (Bälz) therefore also applies to the USA, as does the inference that, with appropriate controls on these tendencies towards privatisation, the corrosion of the state's guarantee of justice can be prevented.

In addition, the wide variety of examples from the USA makes it clear that the relationship between ADR and the Rule of Law is characterised by interdependencies. Among other sources, this results directly from the original goals of ADR, to resolve disputes through forming private-autonomous consensus, ensuring sustainable acceptance of results and thus peace under the law, and thus to relieve pressure on the justice system. In certain categories (such as family matters), it is obvious to evaluate alternative, non-litigious processes a priori as more suitable. Newer remits such as negotiated rule­making, which concentrates not on classic dispute resolution strategies but on communication, concern and compromise in the relationship between those setting and receiving standards, underline the legitimatory potential of actions other than those by the state.

The objective of this sub-project is to investigate the contrary positions in the American discourse in detail, in order to gain fundamental understanding of the difficult relationship between alternative dispute resolution methods and the state process, whose role is to implement the access to justice guaranteed in the constitution.

In the first half of 2012, the literature available in Germany on American alternative dispute resolution processes will be examined. By the last quarter of 2013, work on this literature will have been completed and the research will have been supplemented during a period at an American university and American ADR institutions. It may be possible to complete this by organising a specialist conference. In a third phase (14 months), a report of results will be compiled.