Actes du congrès de Paris de 1900: théorie générale, méthode et enseignement du droit comparé

Abstract

provides an overview about some general developments, but is clearly different from others. It is somehow located between the Anglo-American-style Western legal histories and the Italian-German tradition of European legal history as, basically, a history of private law. Harold Berman, Raoul Van Caenegem, Peter Stein, Franz Wieacker, Antonio Padoa Schioppa, Paolo Grossi – to mention just some of the ‘European Legal Histories’ best known in the English-speaking world – draw on mid-twentieth century intellectual frameworks and their underlying historiographical assumptions. Their narrative moves within the tradition of European law as a body of learned law that evolves within a certain stability over the centuries in a closed space and restricted to the continent. Herzog looks at the same periods and topics, but broadens the scope, introduces the common law world as a natural part of Europe and sets European legal history in a global perspective. It is, like her previous book, Frontiers of Possession (2015), an exercise in comparative legal history, but completely detached from traditional spatial or artificial cultural categories. All this is done in a clear language and with many open questions, in a thought-provoking manner. What else would one wish for from ‘A Short History of European Law’ over the last two and a half millennia?