Research news
Joshua Jowitt: German language approaches to legal personality
Alumni who have been in my office might have noticed, from the stuff I have on the walls, that I’m a secret French speaker. This has been really useful for my current research on legal personality – the way the law designates a being or entity as capable of bearing rights and/or duties. This topic is much more visible in Civil Law systems which have had to codify their approach to how legal personality is recognised, many of which are heavily influenced by the French Code Civil.
But during my last research leave, which I spent at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, I found a lot of material which suggested that the French approach was in turn heavily influenced by German scholarship – in particular Friedrich Carl von Savigny’s System des heutigen Römischen Rechts. It soon became clear that this book was pretty foundational, and that I would need to read it before I started writing my book on legal personality. But here we hit a problem: German speaking colleagues told me that the English translation wasn’t great, and my own German didn’t go much beyond what I’ve picked up on Duolingo (anything you want to know about an owl, I can tell you).
So, I applied for funding from the British Academy to head to Germany to undertake some intensive, fully immersive German lessons at the Goethe Institut in Freiburg am Breisgau. They agreed to fund the trip – so I’ve just gotten back from three weeks learning the language, and a further three weeks visiting Max Planck Institute libraries in Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Hamburg. I wanted to do this so that I could access German language material whilst the lessons were still fresh in my mind, and the plan paid off. I managed to get exactly what I needed – not just from von Savigny, but from lots of other German, French and English material I wouldn’t have been able to find here in the UK. I am immensely grateful to the British Academy for believing in my project and allowing me to undertake the trip, and being on the other side of the seminar table reminded me how hard learning new skills and subjects from scratch. I’ll make the effort to remember that when I’m next teaching legal theory to current Newcastle law students!
