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08 July 2016

BOOK: Massimo MECCARELLI & Maria Julia SOLLA SASTRE (eds.), Spatial and Temporal Dimensions for Legal History. Research Experiences and Itineraries [Global Perspectives on Legal History]. Frankfurt am Main: MPI for European Legal History, 2016, VI + 294 p. ISBN 978-3-944773-05-6


The Max Planck Institute for European Legal History added a sixth volume to its Global Perspectives on Legal History Series (ISSN 2196-9752).

Book presentation:
The spatiotemporal conjunction is a fundamental aspect of the juridical reflection on the historicity of law. Despite the fact that it seems to represent an issue directly connected with the question of where legal history is heading today, it still has not been the object of a focused inquiry. Against this background, the book’s proposal consists in rethinking key confluences related to this problem in order to provide coordinates for a collective understanding and dialogue.
The aim of this volume, however, is not to offer abstract methodological considerations, but rather to rely both on concrete studies, out of which a reflection on this conjunction emerges, as well as on the reconstruction of certain research lines featuring a spatiotemporal component.
This analytical approach makes a contribution by providing some suggestions for the employment of space and time as coordinates for legal history. Indeed, contrary to those historiographical attitudes reflecting a monistic conception of space and time (as well as a Eurocentric approach), the book emphasises the need for a delocalized global perspective. In general terms, the essays collected in this book intend to take into account the multiplicity of the spatiotemporal confines, the flexibility of those instruments that serve to create chronologies and scenarios, as well as certain processes of adaptation of law to different times and into different spaces.
The spatiotemporal dynamism enables historians not only to detect new perspectives and dimensions in foregone themes, but also to achieve new and compelling interpretations of legal history. As far as the relationship between space and law is concerned, the book analyses experiences in which space operates as a determining factor of law, e.g. in terms of a field of action for law. Moreover, it outlines the attempted scales of spatiality in order to develop legal historical research. With reference to the connection between time and law, the volume sketches the possibility of considering the factor of time, not just as a descriptive tool, but as an ascriptive moment (quasi an inner feature) of a legal problem, thus making it possible to appreciate the synchronic aspects of the ‘juridical experience’.
As a whole, the volume aims to present spatiotemporality as a challenge for legal history. Indeed, reassessing the value of the spatiotemporal coordinates for legal history implies thinking through both the thematic and methodological boundaries of the discipline.
 Table of contents:

Introduction

3 Massimo Meccarelli, María Julia Solla Sastre
Spatial and Temporal Dimensions for Legal History:
An Introduction

Experiences

27 Pietro Costa
A ‘Spatial Turn’ for Legal History? A Tentative Assessment
63 Javier Barrientos Grandon
Sobre el “Espacio” y el “Tiempo” y el “Estado de las Personas”.
Una mirada desde la Historia del Derecho
101 Alejandro Agüero
Local Law and Localization of Law. Hispanic Legal Tradition and Colonial Culture (16th –18th Centuries)
131 Marta Lorente Sariñena
Uti possidetis, ita domini eritis. International Law and the Historiography of the Territory

Itineraries

175 Paolo Cappellini
Carl Schmitt revisited. Ripensare il Concetto di ‘Grande Spazio’ (Großraum) in un Contesto Globale
195 Laura Beck Varela
The Diffusion of Law Books in Early Modern Europe:
A Methodological Approach
241 Floriana Colao
Per una Storia del Processo Penale «all’Italiana». «Astratte Modellistiche» e «Abitudini Profondamente Radicate»
279 Giacomo Pace Gravina
Beyond the Lighthouse. Sicily and the ‘Sicilies’:
Institutional Readings of a Borderland
289 Contributors

Conformably to the tradition of this series, all volumes can be downloaded for free.

Fulltext here.

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