04/09/2025
📢 Legal historians and legal theorists, take note: Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History Rg 33 (2025) is coming soon. Subscribe to our newsletter now to receive the new issue directly in your inbox: https://lhlt.communication.mpg.de/a.php?sid=ei9.16fehn6,f=7
This year’s issue investigates language and sources, going beyond words to ask what counts as law, how sources shape our understanding of it, and which methods can help us uncover their meaning. RG 33 highlights three key threads:
• Language and plurality: From late antiquity’s multilingual legal orders to the informality of labour law, this issue shows how different voices and languages produce law and redefine what we call a “source.”
• Methods and media: Legal history is not only read, it can also be counted, visualized, and drawn. Corpus analysis of Der Neue Pitaval demonstrates the reach of digital humanities, while graphic narratives on Indigenous law in Colombia challenge linear ways of telling history.
• Law and justice: From restitution debates in post-war Germany to industrial relations in the 19th and 20th centuries, this issue confronts the tension between law as a technical practice and law as a moral-political question—including the fundamental challenge: What is law?
From ancient texts to digital corpora, from visual storytelling to philosophical inquiry, RG 33 opens new perspectives on how sources speak to us across time.
🔗 Subscribe here so you won’t miss the release: https://lhlt.communication.mpg.de/a.php?sid=ei9.16fehn6,f=7
