"The driving force of the dynamic development of world legal history in the past few centuries, with the dominance of the West, was clearly the demands of modernization - transforming existing reality into what is seen as modern. The need for modernization, determining the development of modern law, however, clashed with the need to preserve cultural identity rooted in national traditions. With selected examples of different legal institutions, countries and periods, the authors of the essays in the two volumes Modernization, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. I: Private Law and Modernization, National Identity and Legal Instrumentalism: Studies in Comparative Legal History, vol. II: Public Law seek to explain the nature of this problem. Contributors are Judit Beke-Martos, Jiří Brňovják, Marjorie Carvalho de Souza, Michał Gałędek, Imre Képessy, Ivan Kosnica, Simon Lavis, Maja Maciejewska-Szałas, Tadeusz Maciejewski, Thomas Mohr, Balázs Pálvölgyi, and Marek Starý"--

This book, one of two volumes, is an anthology that analyses, through selected examples, the role played in the development of private law by the pursuit of goals serving modernisation or national ideologies in various countries, cultural spheres, and periods.

This book, one of two volumes, is an anthology that analyses, through selected examples, the role played in the development of public law by the pursuit of goals serving modernisation or national ideologies in various countries, cultural spheres, and periods.

This book addresses the variety of right-wing illiberal populism which has emerged in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Against the backdrop of weak institutional traditions, frequent and profound transformations, and deep historical traumas affecting the law, politics, economy and society in the region, the book critically examines the entanglements of legality in the region’s transformation from state socialism to neoliberalism and Western-style democracy. Drawing on critical legal theory, as well as legal history, legal theory, sociology of law, history of ideas, anthropology of law, comparative law, and constitutional theory, the book goes beyond conventional analyses to offer an in-depth account of this important contemporary phenomenon. This book will be of interest to legal researchers, especially of a critical or socio-legal perspective, political scientists, sociologists and (legal) historians, as well as policy makers seeking to understand the regional specificity and deeper roots of Central and Eastern European illiberal populism.

These contributions offer fundamental insights into how literary works address and reconceptualize issues of nationalism, groupism, belonging and denationalization in selected European contexts. Various critical perspectives are employed here to highlight modern social and political processes as registered and, to a certain extent, also fashioned by contemporary literary discourses. 'Reimagined communities' emerge from literary redescriptions of existing or imaginary sociopolitical configurations in several European states or regions. All the contributions share a heightened sensitivity to the individual as enmeshed in oppressive geopolitical circumstances. Thereby, literary expressions of how individuality is constrained by social pressures may offer inspiring blueprints for emancipation.

This pertinent and highly original volume explores how ideas of Europe and processes of continental political, socio-economic, and cultural integration have been intertwined since the nineteenth century. Applying a wider definition of Europeanization in the sense of "becoming European", it will pay equal attention to counter-processes of disentanglement and disintegration that have accompanied, slowed down, or displaced such trends and developments. By focusing on the practices, agents, and experience of Europeanization, the volume strives to bring together the history of ideas and the history of human actions and conduct, two approaches that are usually treated separately in the field of European studies.

Common Law, Civil Law, and Colonial Law builds upon the legal historian F.W. Maitland's famous observation that history involves comparison, and that those who ignore every system but their own 'hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history'. The extensive introduction addresses the intellectual challenges posed by comparative approaches to legal history. This is followed by twelve essays derived from papers delivered at the 24th British Legal History Conference. These essays explore patterns in legal norms, processes, and practice across an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range. Carefully selected to provide a network of inter-connections, they contribute to our better understanding of legal history by combining depth of analysis with historical contextualization. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The monograph by Michał Gałędek presents the process of rebuilding administrative structures on the eve of establishment of the Kingdom of Poland in 1815, in connection with the plans of tsar Alexander I to grant a liberal constitutional political system to the Kingdom.

From the ancient beginnings of Western legal tradition, law has been conceived as traversed by a fundamental tension between power (will) and reason. This volume examines the tension between these two poles, 'ratio and voluntas' in modern law. Part I focuses on three instructive phases in the history of the law's ratio. Part II examines the way legal scholarship, especially doctrinal research (legal dogmatics), can and should contribute to the law's coherence. Part III explores the role of constitutional law in managing the tension between law's voluntas and ratio. The final chapter discusses the implications the growth of transnational law may have on the relationship between ratio and voluntas. The study builds on the views of the distinctive features of the ideal-typical mature modern legal system as presented in the author's previous work, Critical Legal Positivism (Ashgate 2002).

This collection of essays brings together international lawyers with their perspectives on how the international community has coped with contemporary cases of nationalist crisis and constitutional lawyers from states which are attempting to facilitate the political expression of national identity through developments in federalism, devolution, and the protection of minority rights. The aim is to explore to what extent existing legal mechanisms permit a flexible engagement with, and accommodation of, the aspirations of national and ethnic groups. It would appear that a heightened level of fluidity in the interaction and exchange of normative standards now exists in the relationship between international and domestic law as both types of system confront the challenge which national identity continues to constitute. As this process marks a renewed preparedness on the part of legal systems to expand imaginatively to meet current problems it is hoped that this collection will highlight opportunities for an ongoing process of development in this complex and troubled area.