Editorial

Abstract

We are delighted to present another exciting issue of Comparative Legal History, the official journal of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH). In the first article, Shaunnagh Dorsett sheds light on judge Barron Field’s attempts to reform Gibraltar’s procedural law in the 1830s. Although the reform failed, its history tells a lot about the movement of ideas in the early-nineteenthcentury British Empire. The reader is left convinced of how useful it is do colonial legal history comparatively. Claudia Passarella’s article continues to delve into the history of procedural law. Passarella’s emphasis is on the relationship between professional judges and laypersons in criminal matters, which she approaches by comparing the decision-making procedures in Italy and Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The author demonstrates how two countries with different legal traditions adopted different solutions when facing similar problems. In the third article of this issue, Thomas Mohr assesses the value of law journals as historical sources for the period between 1922 and 1939 after the partitioning of the island of Ireland. Law journals were not passive observers of the partitioning process. Instead, ‘having to cater for two diverging jurisdictions on the island of Ireland in place of one’, they ‘needed to engage with legal and constitutional developments within the wider Empire’. From the perspective of legal journals, Mohr also provides a comparative analysis of this process of adaptation. As always, the reviews section contains an interesting selection of reviews on recent books. We wish our readers inspiring moments with this issue of Comparative Legal History!