The Department for Legal and Constitutional History is part of the Law Faculty at the University of Vienna. It has a long and successful history that dates back more than 150 years. The Departments roots can be traced back to 1851, when George Philipps was appointed as professor of History of the German Empire and German Law. Since 1951, a variety of reforms have taken place, reshaping both the Department and the curriculum of legal studies at the University of Vienna.

Today, the Department aims to further modernize the History of Law as a subject, and to introduce new generations of law students to Legal and Constitutional History.

For further information on the Department’s history, please access the following link.

VWI invites the Department of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna Judith Vöcker "In the Name of the German Nation" The German Jurisdiction in Warsaw andRadom during the Nazi Occupation of the General Government (1939-1944)

Monday, 26 of April 2021, 15:00-17:00
Online via Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81124963173?pwd=bm1pTjNCc0FUZE9uRVZxd0JSU3pNdz09

For more information click here.

This research project focusses on the German jurisdiction in the General Government and how it treated and punished crimes committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans during the Nazi occupation of Poland. The presentation will address what the occupiers defined as a criminal offense and according to which legal basis these were prosecuted by the German legal entities. The focus lies on the German Court and the Special Court and their verdicts, since they sentenced not only Jewish but also Polish and ethnic German defendants for a plethora of so-called criminal offenses. From a micro-historical point of view, the presentation will examine the development of court verdicts throughout the occupational years in Warsaw and Radom. It thereby shows whether and why any changes within the juridical entities occurred - and whether and how these were connected to the occupation politics for the respective territories or the (un)successful course of the war. To this end, the occupation politics for the General Government will be discussed to reveal for which political and strategic purposes it was established. This is supported by a comparison of similar criminal offences committed by Jews, Poles, and ethnic Germans in order to reconstruct the way these German juridical entities treated criminal cases and offenders from all spheres of society - and lastly, to explore to what extent their verdicts were influenced foremost by their racial ideologies, occupational aims, and the course of the war.

Commented by Miloš Vec & in cooperation with the Department of Legal and Constitutional History, University of Vienna

Modulprüfung: Prüfer*inneneinteilung

Von März 2021 bis Juni 2021 übernimmt Frau Univ.-Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty als neue Prüfer*in hinzu die halbe Namensgruppe von Herrn Univ.-Prof. Dr.iur. Thomas Simon, also Hern - Kinc.

Ab Oktober 2021 wird die gesamte Simon-Namensgruppe von Foljanty geprüft!

Miloš Vec präsentiert seinen Beitrag „Juridification, Politicization, and Circumvention of Law: (De-)Legitimizing Chemical Warfare before and after Ypres, 1899–1925” im Rahmen eines (virtuellen) Events der Association for the Promotion of International Humanitarian Law (Israel). Die Vereinigung veranstaltet einen Book Launch zum Band von Lothar Brock and Hendrik Simon (eds.), The Justification of War and International Order. From Past to Present (2021), erschienen bei Oxford University Press. Die Veranstaltung findet statt am Montag, den 22. Februar 2021, 19:00 Uhr mitteleuropäischer Zeit. Mehr Informationen dazu finden Sie unter diesem Link.

Die Zugangsdaten für die Veranstaltung finden Sie hier:

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/99408395811?pwd=UE5peDR5SGVwL3Z1Y2J5bnlQaDJBUT09

Meeting ID: 994 0839 5811

Passcode: 578705

New professor Lena Foljanty

The Department for Legal and Constitutional History welcomes Prof. Dr. Lena Foljanty as a new member of the Institute as of October 1, 2020. She holds the new chair for globalization and legal pluralism. Before coming to Vienna, she was head of the Max Planck Research Group on the project Translations and Transitions: Legal Practice in 19th Century Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main. She has also been a visiting scholar at the École de hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris), at the University of Tokyo and Gakushu’in University (Tokyo), and has held visiting professorships at Università Bocconi (Milan) and at the Universität Wien. Ms. Lena Foljanty will teach in the coming winter semester. Lena Foljanty will hold the lecture Private Law History, give a course on globalization and legal pluralism and teach the seminar Fritz Bauer or: Auschwitz in Court. As from March 2021 on, Professor Foljanty is responsible for the oral exams of the names Hern – Kinc.

New Post-Doc Sebastian M. Spitra

The Department for Legal and Constitutional History welcomes Dr. Sebastian M. Spitra, B.A., LL.M. (Univ. of Michigan) as a new member of the Institute as of October 1, 2020. He is assigned to the chair of Univ. Prof. Dr. Miloš Vec. Sebastian M. Spitra is a member of the Junge Akademiehttp://www.adwmainz.de/mitglieder/profil/dr-sebastian-m-spitra.html at the Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz and co-editor of the https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/Völkerrechtsblog. He was visiting post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (Frankfurt am Main), visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg) and Fulbright Grantee and Grotius Fellow at the University of Michigan Law School (Ann Arbor). He was already a member of the Institute as a doctoral candidate from 2014 to 2018.

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