The George Washington University Law School welcomes Aniceto Masferrer as the 2014 winner of the Richard & Diane Cummins Legal History Research Grant. The Cummins Grant provides a $10,000 stipend to support short-term historical research using the Special Collections Department at GW’s Jacob Burns Law Library.
Mr. Masferrer, a professor of legal history and comparative law at the University of Valencia, is using the collections to investigate the secularization of criminal law in the early modern age. In conducting his research, he analyzes centuries-old legal arguments that lawyers used to justify evolving standards of punishment and decriminalization. The work requires interpreting texts in a variety of languages, including Latin, English, Spanish, German, and French. During his visit, Professor Masferrer will deliver a presentation to the GW Law faculty on his research, and at the conclusion of the visit, he will submit a summary of the research, Wednesday, 10 September.
“Being here, I may be able to get many sources that otherwise I'd have to go to different places to obtain”, said Professor Masferrer. “This is one of the most remarkable law libraries in the United States in terms of its continental legal sources”.
Scott Pagel, Associate Dean for Information Services and Director of the Law Library, agrees. “Our collection of historical materials is amazingly unique”, he said. “Of course, we have one of the largest collections of materials on the history of French law in the world. Beyond that, we have a great collection of all of the works of significance in civil law so that a researcher would be able to study the legal history of Europe without going from collection to collection. We also have materials on legal history that are not available in any other library in the world”.
Professor Masferrer holds a law degree from the University of Barcelona and a PhD in law from the University of Girona. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Valencia and currently serves as the President of the European Society for Comparative Legal History. He is also member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation and Editor-in-Chief of GLOSSAE European Journal of Legal History. He has published extensively on criminal law from a historical and comparative perspective, as well as on the codification movement and fundamental rights in the Western legal tradition. Professor Masferrer has been a Fellow at the Institute Max-Planck for European Legal History (2000-03), Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (2005), Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (2006-07), Visiting Scholar at Melbourne Law School (2008), Visiting Professor at the University of Tasmania (2010), and Visiting Scholar at Louisiana State University (2013).
About the Special Collections Department
The Special Collections Department of the Jacob Burns Law Library preserves more than 35,000 important legal works from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. Its French Collection is one of the largest assemblages of early French law in the United States. The Incunabula Collection comprises more than 120 titles. Other significant areas of the collection include church-state relations, Roman and canon law, international law, and early American statutes and practitioner guides. The library is noted for its continental historical legal collections, especially its French collection, with strengths in Roman and canon law, church-state relations, international law and many incunabula holdings.
Last update: 8 de september de 2014 12:54.
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