0 REMINDER: ARTICLES SOUGHT FOR COMPARATIVE LEGAL HISTORY (the ESCLH Journal)

The European Society for Comparative Legal
History (ESCLH) has agreed with Hart Publishing (UK) to produce a new journal. Comparative Legal
History (CLH), an international and comparative review of law
and history, will be the official journal of the ESCLH. 

The journal will be published, both online and in print, twice a year, appearing in the spring and
the autumn. The first
issue will appear in Spring 2013:

Articles will explore
both 'internal' legal history (doctrinal and disciplinary developments in the
law) and 'external' legal history (legal ideas and institutions in wider
contexts). Rooted in the complexity of the various Western legal traditions
worldwide, the journal will also investigate other laws and customs from around
the globe. Comparisons may be either temporal or geographical and both legal
and other law-like normative traditions will be considered. Scholarship on
comparative and trans-national historiography, including trans-disciplinary
approaches, is particularly welcome.

The Editors welcome
scholarly submissions in the English language:

To submit an article
please contact Articles Editor Heikki
Pihlajamäki (heikki.pihlajamaki@helsinki.fi).
The optimal length for articles is between 7500 to 15000 words, including
footnotes. All articles are submitted to double blind peer review.

To propose a review,
please contact Reviews Editor Agustin Parise (agustin.parise@maastrichtuniversity.nl).
Book reviews will generally range from 1500 to 2500 words. Review articles will
also be considered.

The Hart website also has information on the Editors (both the Editorial Staff and International Editorial Board), an Email alert service of the 'Table of Contents', and subscription information. 

Note that a special arrangement between
the ESCLH and Hart has been made to ensure that, beginning next year, ESCLH
membership fees will include a subscription to CLH.

Potential
contributors should pay special attention to the ‘Notes for Contributors’ on
the website. In particular, contributors whose first language is not English
are strongly advised to have their papers edited by native Anglophone
scholars in advance of their
submission to ensure a clear presentation of their ideas and an accurate
appraisal of their work.



Finally, note that CLH isn't likely to include short articles in its first few issues. 

Spread the word. 

0 NOTICE: Australasian Colonial Legal History Library

The Australasian Colonial Legal History Library is now online! For more information read the article "Digitising and Searching Australasian Colonial Legal History" by G. Greenleaf, P. Chung, A. Mowbray and B. Salter.



Abstract:



Australasia has
a rich and complex legal history since the first European settlement, and our
knowledge of legal practice and precedent in the colonies of Australasia is
still developing. The Australasian Colonial Legal History Library project is an
ARC-funded project being carried out by the Australasian Legal Information
Institute (AustLII) since January 2012 with input from 18 legal historians from
Universities across Australia. Cooperation with other parties who have already
built invaluable and pioneering online resources for Australasian colonial law
is an essential part of the project.

AustLII is a free access online
service which has operated since 1995 as a joint facility provided by UNSW and
UTS Law Faculties , and now provides over 500 databases, with usage of over
700,000 page accesses per day. The Colonial Legal History Library project is
therefore being built within a large and mature research infrastructure, and
this presents challenges as well as advantages. In particular, many of the
AustLII databases cover the whole period from the formation of a colony to the
present, so the databases for this Library have to be ‘virtual’ databases
extracted from this larger corpus.

The paper explains the construction,
content and features of the first version of the Library, which as of July 2012
contains 12 databases including one case law database from each of the seven
colonies (including New Zealand), some of which are ‘recovered’ cases from
newspaper reports, the complete annual legislation to 1900 from three of the
colonies, plus legal scholarship concerning the colonial era. These databases
provide over 20,000 documents so far, and the Victorian Government Gazette
1851-1900 another 200,000. The Library also includes the LawCite citator, which
allows the subsequent citation history of any colonial case to be tracked,
including if cited by courts outside Australasia.

The medium term aim of
this part of the ARC project (which extends to 1950 in its full scope) is to
include all legislation, reported cases, and cases which can be ‘recovered’,
from the inception of each colony to 1900. Scholarship (old and new) and key
source materials are also being added, as budgets permit. We hope that the
Library will be a leader in the creation of legal history resources from the
colonial era.

0 CALL FOR PAPERS: Journal of History and Cultures

The Journal of History and Cultures (JHAC) is issuing a Call for Papers for the next issue and welcomes articles on subjects in the fields of history and cultures within a broad geographic and chronological range. We are also accepting book reviews.

JHAC is a peer-reviewed journal and an excellent new publishing opportunity both for postgraduates and established academics. Articles should be 5,000-7,000 words in length. We encourage articles that consider and engage with historical, cultural, political, social, and theoretical research in new and original ways. Reviews should be 750-1,000 words in length. Review essays should be in-depth engagements with recent books which develop an argument to complement the reading of the text. A list of books available for review will be appearing on our website; alternatively, you can contact our reviews editor directly to request a specific book to review at jhac@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

The deadline for submissions is 1st October 2012.

Full submission and formatting guidelines can be found at: http://historyandcultures.com/submissions/

Finally, we invite you to join the JHAC community on both Facebook and Twitter @UOBJHAC for regular updates.

We are offering a £50 prize for the best article.

Please email all submissions and address any enquiries to jhac@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

0 NOTICE: 39. Deutscher Rechtshistorikertag (Lucerne, 2-6 September 2012)

The Institute Lucernarius of the University of Lucerne (Switzerland) organizes the 39th Day of Legal Historians (Rechtshistorikertag). It will take place from the 2nd to the 6th of September 2012, for the fourth time in Switzerland and for the first time in Lucerne. The plenary opening session will begin on the 2nd of Sepember at 5:00 pm with an address by prof. Peter von Matt. More information about the program, which includes, as a novelty, a poster-session, are available here (papers in German and in English).

0 NOTICE: SHEAR Annual Conference (Baltimore, 19-22 July 2012)

The 2012 Society of Historians of the Early American Republic's Annual Conference starts today in Baltimore, Maryland. For more information see: http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.it/2012/07/legal-history-at-shear.html