030316 KU Law and Empire (2018S)

Empires are a popular topic in several academic disciplines, ranging from history and the political sciences to cultural studies. Law, though lagging behind, is no exception. The lecture explores the „imperial turn“ in the legal sciences. After a brief overview over the more tradtional examples, where the law & empire debate had always been part of the story, in particular Roman Law and the legal orders of the European colonial empires, the lecture will move on to inquire into the underlying reasons of the recent turn to empire in legal studies, the erosion of the state and the state-centred international order as the point of reference for legal thought. Persistent and re-emerging asymmetries, hierarchies and differences require a reconceptualization of classical 19th and 20th century assumptions about law. The lecture addresses the impact of the imperial turn both for domestic and for internatioal law. The United Sates of America, the European Union, India and Israel provide contemporary case studies. For the long 19th century the lecture relies on examples from the British and the Habsburg Empire. Drawing on current research the lecture also explores the contributions, which such highly diverse early-modern polities as the Holy Roman Empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Rzeczpospolita, the Danish Rike and the Mughal Empire may make to the law & empire debate.