NOTICE: Legal History e-Journal

SSRN’s Legal History e-Journal has noted the following articles:

• Twenty-First Century Outlawry: Historical Principles for Conducting Targeted Killings in Accordance with Due Process - Jane Y. Chong, Yale University - Law School
• Baltimore after the War of 1812: Where Robert Mills Met His Waterloo and When James A. Buchanan Broke the Bank - Garrett Power, University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
• The Generality of Law - Timothy A.O. Endicott, University of Oxford - Faculty of Law
• Authoring an Invention: Patent Production in the Nineteenth-Century United States - Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University - School of Law
• The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution - Malick W. Ghachem, University of Maine School of Law
• Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland: An Inventory - Bill Rolston, University of Ulster - Transitional Justice Institute
• The Critical Promise of the New History of European Law - Peter L. Lindseth, University of Connecticut School of Law
• The Judge and the Historian: Transnational Holocaust Litigation as a New Model - Leora Bilsky, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law
• Legal Systems and Informal Authorities - Nils Jansen, University of Muenster

The abstract of the last article reads:

The article considers the nature of authorities in the law, and, specifically, the often undervalued yet important role played by informal auctoritas, by contrast with formally binding enactments. It explores the terminological difficulties within modern discourse which make discussion and understanding of such informal authorities difficult. Exemplarily, the status of Roman sources in the ius commune is considered in detail, establishing the informal criteria which determine their authoritative quality - belief in the extraordinary quality of the texts and the jurists’ mutual expectations of applying them. The analysis then proceeds to modern German practice and the enormously significant role played by learned Commentaries in the work of practising lawyers and courts – a phenomenon difficult to explain without recourse to a concept of informal authority. Finally, this understanding is demonstrated in the context of transnational private law by reference to the modern phenomenon of non-legislative codifications, such as the American Restatements, the Principles of European Contract Law and the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts; all those codifications have gained a substantial informal authority as reference texts for international legal discourse.