Peking University, March 5, 2025: The 46th Adventus Amicorum series of symposia was hosted by the Institute of Area Studies of Peking University on March 4, 2025, themed “Historical Regimes of Normativity”, delivered by Professor Thomas Duve from Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.
Professor Duve expounded on emergence of Legal History and Comparative Law from a shared paradigm of historical jurisprudence, went through a century of divergence, during which they developed “their own institutions, canons of knowledge, mechanisms of communication, and academic practices”. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shaped by nation state and Western imperialism, both disciplines advanced vibrantly. Under transnationalization, the objects of LH and CL are no longer exclusive to the “law”, but also other normalitivities, for example, religions, customs, and social norms. The two currents have recognized the necessity of analyzing the production of law and other normativities as a knowledge-based process.
The Historical Regimes of Normativity proposed by Professor Duve was built upon the regime theory, which defines “regime” as a form of observation of consolidated arrangements of discourse, practices, principles, institutions (i.e., knowledge), etc., with regard to the production of normality for a certain field of action. For instance, in view of providing security, we may compare historical or current regimes, integrating “religious” practices for example, instead of “criminal law”; to regulate division of labour, we may analyze regimes, instead of “labor law”; in terms of exercise of power, regimes may also be adopted to take over constitutional law.
Professor Duve and the symposium participants conduct a discussion
Upon the end of the lecture, participants comprising PKU faculty members conducted an in-depth discussion with Professor Duve on Legal History and Comparative Law. Assistant Professor Lai Huaxia, from the School of International Studies, put forward the first battery of questions concerning the operationalization the notion of regime, the boundaries of the knowledge-based practice of producing, bringing peripheral non-state actors into the new framework, overcoming the methodological limits of endorsing powerful multinational institutions. Taking a word from social scientific discourse, “glocalization”, a combination of “globalization” and “localization”, Professor Duve emphasized the reconstruction of global processes from the local perspective, and the need to contextualize very deeply, preventing from falling into the pitfall of reinforcing big institutions. He also called for opening our observation for the production of normativities in these social spaces. He recounted his approach of breaking borders in the first place, and as of the definition of the border, the regime theory has provided a framing. To operationalize the regimes, he took Latin America as an example of the moral theology impact on normative orders, where missionaries administered justice in an everyday practice by giving out small booklets, demonstrating that millions of small acts create normativities.
Professor Li Honghai, from PKU Law School, divided legal history into 2 stages, the first started from the 19th century, originated from the Germans, and the second saw much more attention paid to non-state rules. Furthermore, he projected the third stage to turn back to the Western university. While Professor Duve shared Professor Li’s perspective on the first two stages, he conceived a different picture for the third stage where analytical tools and perspectives to jurists and to people who are observing our legal systems today to resist the pressure brought about by new technologies of the production of normativities.
Associate Professor Chen Yifeng from PKU Law School, probed into the knowledge studies approach and global legal history. Additionally, Post-Doctoral Researcher Wu Jingjian, from PKU Law School, consulted about the legitimacy of global legal history papers to be published in the field of law. Professor Duve suggested a strategic equilibrium between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, based on the understanding of law as a knowledge-based practice of producing normality. He also made an analogy with the scenario of a football game, where we have to know what the players have in mind, even if they don't obey the rules, comparable to the knowledge-based practice in law.
Written by: He Yike
Edited by: Zhang Jiang
Photo by: Wu Yingjuan
