Law and/as Conceptual History

This session introduces the study of law through the lens of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), exploring how legal concepts are formed, contested, and transformed across time and space. Rather than treating law as a fixed system of rules, the presentation highlights its character as a historically contingent and linguistically mediated practice, in which meaning is negotiated through evolving vocabularies. Taking as its starting point a postcard from the end of the world sent by Carl Schmitt to Reinhart Koselleck, the session focuses on recent work on the conceptual history of (international) law, it problematises the situatedness of key legal concepts within broader intellectual and political contexts, and reflects on related ongoing theoretical debates. Core methodological approaches and their relevance for contemporary legal research will be considered, with particular attention to the movement of concepts across temporal and spatial boundaries, their role in structuring legal argument, and the challenges of writing (and drawing from) global conceptual histories beyond Eurocentric frames.

Alexandra Kemmerer is Senior Research Fellow and Academic Coordinator at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, and Head of the Institute’s Berlin Office. In 2025, she was a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Senior Visiting Fellow at the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law, University of Melbourne. Her research interests include histories and theories of international law and European law, constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, context(s) of law, and the media theory and communicative praxis of law. As an academic, writer and journalist, she is particularly interested in institutional histories and in interrelations between biography, doctrine, and theory. Publications on conceptual history include: Alexandra Kemmerer, ‘(Völker)RechtsBegriffsgeschichten’ (2020) 62 Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 19–26; ‘Ad limina: Koselleck und die völkerrechtliche Imagination in der Krise’ (2022) 64(2) Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 45–59.