Marginalia on Morals, Rhetoric, and Law. Apropos Sen. contr. 2.7.

Gender-Competent Legal Education, 2023

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

The aim of the seminar is to problematize the legal phenomena in a multidisciplinary approach and beyond the normative and descriptive dimensions of laws and legislations. Considering law as a multi-layered dynamic process, the seminar intends to explore the complex relationship between law, legal institutions and social dynamics and to problematize law within the social landscape and the particular cultural settings in which it emerges in relation to a variety of social actors. Normative approaches investigating law only understand it within the narrow context of legal reforms and are far from reflecting the epistemological process, which preceded the final textual productions. Without leaving aside the making of state laws and other forms of normativity, the epistemological dimension of the seminar will focus on law in all its variety, in the form of ideas, ways of reasoning, doctrines, legal and cultural transfers and will analyze the role of education and other processes (Enlightenment, invention of the printing press, etc.) in the development of legal thought. The seminar will also contextualize law within historical momentums and global movements (such as constitutionalism, dynamics of colonialism, revolutions, etc.) and will address issues such as legal pluralism and imperialism. The various themes of this seminar will also overlap with those of colonial and imperial history. The seminar will privilege the Ottoman space in relation to Europe without neglecting the global context by offering a list of suggested readings on the legal history of other geographies as well. The time frame under consideration will be mainly the nineteenth century. Requirements Every week, participants will be asked to read in advance a certain number of selected texts and to present the readings. Participants will be responsible only for essential readings. Suggested readings are only to give further ideas on the legal developments of the Ottoman space and other geographies for comparative purposes. The seminar targets an audience of students in their final year of bachelor's degree program as well as master's students and PhD candidates. In that respect, in addition to participation-presentation, bachelor's degree students will have an exam while master's students and PhD candidates will submit a term paper (10.000 words maximum) based on a research theme of their choice and related to the seminar at the end of the term. The grade for the seminar will consist of: Participation-presentation: 30% Exam (for bachelor's degree students): 70%

Gender Competent Legal Education, 2023

This chapter analyses the key gender issues throughout comparative legal history, from the Antiquity to the contemporary era. A wide array of subjects will be briefly touched upon, such as the traditional roles of men and women and their legal recognition, the legal status of women, the patriarchal patterns and the trends of their change, the interaction of religion and law in these areas. These various subjects all portray a millennia-long domination of the patriarchal system and the long and arduous struggle for gender equality. The text is mainly concerned with the Western legal systems, broadly speaking-European, Near-Eastern and American-showcasing individual legal systems in the Antiquity and Middle Ages, where differences during these times were greater, but focusing instead on key issues and areas of law in the Modern era, where convergence and common tendencies become more pronounced. By understanding these issues in their historical context, readers will gain valuable knowledge of the historical background of the current status of gender relations in the main legal systems of the world.

Gender-Competent Legal Education

This chapter analyses the key gender issues throughout comparative legal history, from the Antiquity to the contemporary era. A wide array of subjects will be briefly touched upon, such as the traditional roles of men and women and their legal recognition, the legal status of women, the patriarchal patterns and the trends of their change, the interaction of religion and law in these areas. These various subjects all portray a millennia-long domination of the patriarchal system and the long and arduous struggle for gender equality. The text is mainly concerned with the Western legal systems, broadly speaking—European, Near-Eastern and American—showcasing individual legal systems in the Antiquity and Middle Ages, where differences during these times were greater, but focusing instead on key issues and areas of law in the Modern era, where convergence and common tendencies become more pronounced. By understanding these issues in their historical context, readers will gain valuable know...

The questions implied in this title are difficult to answer. As for the pre-Tanzimat period (before about 1870), which is the topic of this presentation, the number of texts composed by women is very small. Mostly, we depend on entries in the registers of local judges/kadıs, in which women occur but occasionally; and if they do turn up, the words that they speak are those required by court protocol, and probably unfamiliar to the speakers in everyday life. In many cases, female plaintiffs and defendants would have spoken in dialects or even languages that the kadı and his scribes struggled to understand, and the judge and members of his court relied on translators or mediators who might (or might not) have provided reliable renditions of what the women at issue actually said. Furthermore, kadıs' courts operated in towns, and only on occasion did substitute judges hear cases in villages. For women, who according to custom were not to venture far from their homes, the court might thus be impossible to access, to say nothing of the fees demanded by the judges, their scribes and low-level court servitors. Moreover, it was often nearly impossible for women to locate the witnesses required, who were mostly male, and without whose testimony they could not prove their cases. Thus, scholars including Boğaç Ergene have queried why women even went to court, if the rejection of their pleas was so likely. Focusing on the interface between law and social mores, some scholars have suggested that even an unproven accusation, once registered, was a 'black mark' against the accused, who if he later became the object of another complaint, could no longer claim to be a person of unquestioned good morals.1

Rechtsgeschichte (Rg) , 2016

"Translating Law for Women? The 'Institutes du droit civil pour les dames' in Eighteenth-Century Helmstedt" 'Institutes du droit civil pour les dames' is the title of a unique piece of work printed in 1751 in the small town of Helmstedt. Its author, a little known jurist, Johann Heinrich Kratzenstein (1726–1805), close to the Pietistic circles, composed an abridged French translation in 48 pages of Justinian’s Institutes, one of the most widespread texts in European legal history. It was written as a birthday gift for a noblewoman, Regina Charlotte Topp, wife of an influential law professor of the University of Helmstedt. This short essay examines this rare attempt to translate and adapt Latin juridical texts for a female audience. What legal topics did Kratzenstein choose? What kind of legal knowledge did he consider »suitable« for the »other«, the female readership? What kind of reader did he »construct«, and what motivated him to engage in such a singular project? How was his work received? Could jurisprudence find a place among the new »popular« scientific and philosophical genres, promoted in certain enlightened circles, especially on the bookshelves of the so-called 'Frauenzimmer Bibliotheken'? To answer these questions about Kratzenstein’s translation, I discuss a topic that has so far been neglected by mainstream legal history, which is traditionally centered on legal scholarship: the vivid early modern debate on women’s education (the so-called querelle des femmes) and its impact on the field of jurisprudence in the eighteenth century.

In this paper, I explain Moses Finley’s problem with scholarship on ancient civilization, which hitherto has categorized individuals or groups as either free or unfree. Adherence to such an antimony must ignore details required to realistically make judgements about the status of citizens in ancient societies whose social positions may vary greatly or change over time depending on socio-political circumstances. To be unfree does not quite mean that one is a slave and to be a non-citizen does not also mean one is unfree or a slave. These are just a few of the complications arising from the use of such binary thinking about freedom. Finley uncovers many contradictions through examples, especially in Ancient Greece, and points out reasons for the complex nature of status. He suggests that there is evidence out there to solve the problem, but scholars simply have not yet studied documents properly or found the right ones. I argue that his advice is lacking in two respects. Firstly, he uncritically accepts that documents (laws) mirror the social reality of ancient society that is actually highly contested space, and secondly, he fails to include women in his analysis of the problem. Only through rigorous interpretation of the context of documents and by incorporating women into the scope of the problem, can a more accurate analysis of social status be complete.

This section presents new and original research that examines historical topics that for various reasons have not received much scholarly attention. There are in all historiographies silences, omissions and gaps. Sometimes they are purposeful, part of a collective, selective forgetting about parts of the historical record considered not worthy of being preserved as sites of memory. Other times they are caused by the belief that the source materials needed to write about a topic are not available or are inaccessible. And at still other times, they occur because the political climate in a given place at a specific time make writing about certain historical topics extremely difficult. For whatever reasons, then, gaps, lacunae and selective silences occur in the historical record. The articles to be published in this section of Historein speak to those silences, erase those lacunae and explore the hitherto uncharted topics of the past.

Women in Law and Lawmaking in Nineteenth-and Twentieth-century Europe, 2014

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Estudios Humanísticos. Historia, 2002

El presente artículo no pretende ser más que un acercamiento al estudio de uno de los grandes, y a la par desconocidos, conjuntos documentales custodiados en los archivos: la documentación de carácter judicial. En este caso, nos aproximaremos a ella a través de serie de pleitos del Archivo Municipal de Alicante, analizando varios procesos relacionados con mundo femenino, y más concretamente con mujeres pertenecientes a los niveles inferiores de la escala social. De su situación conflictiva y marginal damos cuenta a través de cuatro casos acaecidos durante el siglo XVIII, examinando los diferentes tipos documentales y forma de inicio de las causas en que se ven envueltas