Editorial

Abstract

Comparative legal history is a fertile autonomous discipline gathering a growing number of adherents from across the globe. This journal aims to offer a forum for the studies that result from that discipline and that look at law transversely through time and space. It was first published in 2013, and it is part of the wider efforts of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH). The journal is based in Europe, though both its Editorial Board and its International Editorial Board gather comparative legal historians from across the globe, making palpable that the autonomous discipline is expanding sans frontières. Issue 2 of Volume 10 gathers contributions from different corners of the world, hence confirming the statement above, showing the global dimension of this discipline. The first article, by Fernando Pérez Godoy, Carlos Fernando Teixeira Alves and Fernando Liendo Tagle, offers a transatlantic exercise of comparative legal history. The authors trace and place the presence of natural law and the law of nations at three centres for the study of law (ie, Coimbra, Seville, and Santiago de Chile) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intellectual dialogue amongst forums and actors unveils the transnational history of these fields, both with an impact on legal education and politics. The second article, by Saliha Belmessous, raises a question that the literature had failed to fully answer: what is a colonial treaty? The author looks at agreements that European states concluded with non-European polities as from the late fifteenth century. The role of natural law and the law of nations in thereby noted, while the article alerts on the different understandings of what were ‘unequal treaties.’ After all, we need to know the history and extent of terms we use when engaging in comparative legal history. The third article, by Lukasz Jan Korporowicz and John Gwilym Owen, deals with a pillar of law and society by looking at entailed property in Poland and England and Wales. Their comprehensive study traces the evolution in both jurisdictions across time, tackling multiple aspects of the life of entails, placing them within social, political, and religious contexts. The three articles in this issue remind readers that comparative legal historical efforts can only but benefit from the rich contexts that derive from interdisciplinary approaches to law. Law has to be placed in the corresponding context in order to fully unveil its development across time and space. The book reviews section of this issue presents nine monographs that confirm the global dimension of comparative legal history. The first book reviewed deals with European legal thought (or in words of its author, ‘legal imagination’) exploring a c 500-year path that is linked to the law of nations and to the