Legal History and The Material Turn

Abstract

This chapter considers the implications of the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences for the study and writing of legal history. It suggests three paths forward for how legal historians might incorporate these insights into their research. These approaches are labelled as ‘categorizing’, ‘materializing’, and ‘filing’. ‘Categorizing’ refers to the possibility of redrawing ontological categories which could open up new ways of understanding law in the past. ‘Materializing’ looks at an analytical approach in which law is understood as a phenomenon composed of the material things it draws into itself. ‘Filing’ looks at the materiality of legal systems, both through their processes of record creation and their performative praxis, focusing attention on the co-constitutive nature of law and its material-bureaucratic apparatus.

Ontology-Mediated Historical Data Modeling: Theoretical and Practical Tools for an Integrated Construction of the Past

“…As equivalent and comparable units, UT and US are part of the well-known Harris' matrix diagram [35] (pp. [34][35][36][37][38][39] and, when exploited from knowledge bases, could be analyzed, exploited, and represented in terms of knowledge graph technology [53,54]. If considering, as L. Ehrlinger and W. Wöess did [55] (p. 3), that the Knowledge Graph acquires and integrates information into an ontology and applies a reasoner to derive new knowledge, the potential of our ontology-mediated data modeling could significantly increase.…”

“…The final stage of archaeological fieldwork is the production of a report or the publication of a paper that will hopefully be integrated in the Construction of the Past. As the so-called material [36][37][38][39] and spatial turns [40][41][42][43] develop in Historical Science, data integration, and the search for a common and shared exploitation code is a much-needed strategy.…”

Law as Architecture: Mapping Contingency and Autonomy in Twentieth-Century Legal Historiography

“…The law's spatial quality redraws ontological boundaries. For a genealogy of the material turn in the humanities and history, see Johnson (2018). 54 We are drawing from the work of Søren Kierkegaard to articulate our notion of the "existential bent:" in particular, his account in Fear and Trembling of facing an impossible choice where no grounds exist to justify one course of action over another and, therefore, the decisionmaker has to make a "radical choice" and be responsible for the foreseen and unforeseen consequences (Kierkegaard [1843] 2003; Evans and Roberts 2013).…”