Forum: Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History: An Introduction

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries global intellectual history in its subtitle- A stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses.