Seán Patrick Donlan

Comparative Legal Histories, Pluralities, and Empires

Neither the european society for Comparative Legal History (esCLH) nor this journal has ever sought to rigidly define the boundaries of our ‘comparative legal history’. We are, and ought to be, a broad church. of course, reasonable, uncontentious and ecumenical definitions of the subject can be found. sixteen years ago, for example, matthias reimann and alain Levasseur wrote that ‘comparative legal history’ is the description and comparison of ‘the historical development of different legal traditions’, allowing us to ‘draw conclusions from the observed similarities and differences to enhance our understanding of the respective systems’.1 this seems straightforward enough. With this definition, ‘comparative legal history’ is the juxtaposition or observation of laws

Mixed and Mixing Systems Worldwide

This article introduces an online collection of pieces on mixed legal systems in the European Journal of Comparative Law and Governance. The articles are derived from the Third International Congress of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the summer of 2011.

The Mediterranean Hybridity Project

The extraordinary legal and normative hybridity (“hybridity”) of the Mediterranean region was produced in a complex history of conquest, colonisation, and social and legal diffusion across shifting and porous boundaries. Its various legal traditions, past and present, include the Anglo-British, canonical, continental, Islamic, Ottoman, Roman, socialist, and Talmudic traditions as well as various other customary and trans-territorial traditions. This plurality of official or state laws is complemented and further complicated by an equally diverse and dynamic normative pluralism. Studies of hybridity have, however, been isolated, sporadic, and too often framed within narrow jurisdictional and disciplinary constraints. This paper briefly outlines an emerging research project, the Mediterranean Hybridity Project, on the legalities, both state laws and other meaningful normative orders, in the Mediterranean. Rooted in established comparative methods and employing the conceptual vocabulary of the social sciences, a questionnaire will guide the production of reports that attempt to capture the hybridity of the jurisdictions/locales studied. It is our hope that the published reports and their analysis will generate more accurate, useful, and accessible accounts of Mediterranean hybridity than existing taxonomies, models, and methods. Developed by the Juris Diversitas group, the Project will build on a ‘new rapproachement’ between comparatists and social scientists. In particular, it will draw on the analysis of (i) the legal hybridity of, “mixed legal systems,” where diverse state laws emerge from different legal traditions and (ii) the normative hybridity of so-called, “legal,” or, “normative pluralism.” The former acknowledges a legal world of great variety and complexity; the latter posits an essential dialectic between state law and other meaningful, non-state normative orders. Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and beyond suggest how useful greater knowledge of Mediterranean hybridity might be.

The “Genuine Voice of its Records and Monuments”?: Edmund Burke’s “Interior History of Ireland

In ‘The “Genuine voice of its records and monuments”?: Edmund Burke’s “Interior history of Ireland”’, Sean Patrick Donlan documents Burke’s relationships with Irish historians and his engagement with contemporary Irish historiographical debates. If this ‘interior history’ ‘was neither especially novel nor always accurate’, he argues, ‘concepts critical to Burke scholarship … take on added significance in light of his Irish experiences and his views on its past.’ Indeed, ‘contextualising him in this way may also assist in understanding the complex varieties of Irish and British identities in the eighteenth century.’