IV. Tagung des Jungen Netzwerks Rechtsgeschichte – Ungleichzeiten: Recht und Ungleichheiten in gegenwärtigen Vergangenheiten (18.–20. Juni 2026, HU Berlin).

Ein Mann wird 2018 getötet, in den Tagen danach mobilisieren rechtsradikale Gruppen nach Chemnitz. Nun ist ein weiterer Prozess zu Ende gegangen. Die Nebenklage spricht von Verschleppung und Inkonsequ...

„Strategische Prozessführung“ ist ein ebenso schillernder wie uneindeutiger Begriff. Beispiele für „strategische Prozessführungen“ aus der jüngsten Vergangenheit sind vielfältig. So verklagte ein peru...

Ville Erkkilä and Luisa Gries have published “The Problem Can Be Solved Only by Those Imbued with a Socialist Sense of Justice!”: Social Conflict and the Lower Courts in the German Democratic Republic open access in Law and History Review:The article concentrates on the massive project of popularizing the court system and penal practice in the GDR in the 1960s. From then on, the GDR transferred a considerable amount of jurisdiction to collectives, which were further assigned the task of adjudicating “close to the people” within and alongside the existing legal system. We will analyze how the government with this project managed to translate the ideological task of sanctioning the inner-state enemy into existing legal concepts, and how it used law as a means to advance its political aims. By focusing on the judicialization of politics in the GDR, the article examines the legal history of the GDR as an important example in the broader and pressing phenomenon of the relationship between law and authoritarian politics. --Dan Ernst

Constitutional Panic in British India: How the Ilbert Bill Controversy of 1883 Revealed the Constitutive Character of Racial Discrimination in the British Empire

The error of their mythology about 1989 matters because we face another such moment of historical rupture today.

Ingeborg Maus war eine der wichtigsten Demokratietheoretikerinnen der Nachkriegszeit. Nun ist sie im Alter von 87 Jahren gestorben. Von Peter Niesen

A few victories made it easy for Democrats to forget that the law is just another domain of politics where their enemies enjoy power too.