Routledge Studies in Comparative Legal History
About the Book Series
This series covers the general area of comparative legal history, including contributions focusing on both 'internal' legal history, i.e., doctrinal and disciplinary developments in the law, and 'external' legal history, i.e., legal ideas and institutions in wider contexts. Considering the various legal traditions worldwide, the series also welcomes works dealing with other laws and customs from around the globe. Temporal or geographical in approach, the series will consider both legal and similar law-like normative traditions. Works encompassing views from different schools of thought and contributions from comparative and transnational historiography, including interdisciplinary approaches, are encouraged. With a focus on higher level research in the form of monographs and edited collections, proposals for supplementary reading and textbooks are also welcomed.
Series editors :
Aniceto Masferrer is Professor of Legal History and teaches legal history and comparative law at the Faculty of Law, University of Valencia, Spain. He has published extensively on criminal law from an historical and comparative perspective, as well as on the codification movement and fundamental rights in the Western legal tradition.
Heikki Tapio Pihlajamäki is Professor of Comparative Legal History, Faculty of Law, University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published widely, in a number of languages, on various aspects of comparative legal history.
Series board:
Tatjana Borisova, Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg
Luisa Brunori, Lille 2 University
Emanuele Conte, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Matthew Dyson, University of Oxford
Manuel Gutan, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
Dirk Heirbaut, Ghent University
Phillip Hellwege, University of Augsburg
Mia Korpiola, University of Turku
Marju Luts-Sootak , University of Tartu
Emi Matsumoto, Aoyama Gakuin University
Matthew C. Mirow, Florida International University
Ulrike Müßig, Universität Passau
Jacques du Plessis, Stellenbosch University
Helle Vogt, University of Copenhagen
James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School
Alain Wijffels, Université Catholique de Louvain, Leiden University, CNRS
The Making of Criminal Law: The Role of Case Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries
1st Edition
Edited
By Aniceto Masferrer
November 12, 2025
The separation of powers produced by the Enlightenment period reinforced the myth of the “perfection of the law”, with criminal law being dependent on the principle of legality. Demonstrating that this principle has not fundamentally altered judges' methods of interpretation and decision-making, ...
The Evolution of Justice, Equity and Equality: Practical Wisdom from the Past
1st Edition
Edited
By Iwona Barwicka-Tylek, Jan Halberda, Maciej Mikuła
September 23, 2025
This book presents a comprehensive exploration of historical perspectives on justice, equity, and equality, which have been, and still are, considered as the core political values of any balanced political system. Combining historical methodology with wider philosophical and ethical insights, the ...
Framing Devices and Global Legal Traditions: From the Ancient World to the Modern Nation State
1st Edition
Edited
By Laura Culbertson, Susan Longfield Karr
July 25, 2025
This collection explores prefaces, prologues, paratexts, and other types of framing devices. Across world history, these devices have introduced the law, articulated its context and audience, identified the basis of legal and moral authority, critiqued existing conditions, or even tried to "restore...
Borders of the Early Modern Ius Commune: England, Venice, and Scandinavia
1st Edition
Edited
By Dolores Freda, Mario Piccinini, Heikki Pihlajamäki, Chiara Maria Valsecchi
May 30, 2025
The culture of the ius commune has been a unifying element of European and Western legal civilization. As shown by several recent studies, the influence of ius commune extended much farther than its traditional core area. This volume discusses the expansion and changes of ius commune in three ...
English Law, the Legal Profession, and Colonialism: Histories, Parallels, and Influences
1st Edition
Edited
By Cerian Griffiths, Łukasz Jan Korporowicz
April 14, 2025
Modern legal history is increasingly interested in exploring the development of legal systems from novel and nuanced approaches. This edited collection harnesses the lesser-researched perspectives of the impact of global and imperial factors on the development of law. It is argued that to better ...
Nazi Antisemitism and Jewish Legal Self-Defense: The Turn to Law in Liberal Democracies, 1932–39
1st Edition
By David Fraser
December 18, 2024
One of the first to provide a socio-legal comparative history of under-studied or ignored Jewish attempts in the 1930s "Anglosphere" to counter the rise in fascist and Nazi antisemitism, this book examines the ways in which Jewish individuals and organized communal bodies in the mid-to-late 1930s ...
State Liability and the Law: A Historical and Comparative Analysis
1st Edition
By Bartłomiej Wróblewski
October 08, 2024
This book explores the historical foundations of holding public authorities accountable for their acts, and discusses how and why the idea that the state should or should not be held liable became established in three significant jurisdictions. The issue of state liability for legislative acts is ...
Tracing British West Indian Slavery Laws: A Comparative Analysis of Legal Transplants
1st Edition
By Justine K. Collins
September 25, 2023
This book provides a legal historical insight into colonial laws on enslavement and the plantation system in the British West Indies. The volume is a work of comparative legal history of the English-speaking Caribbean which concentrates on how the laws of England served to catalyse the slavery ...