Law – Politics – Institutions

Legal culture, political and judicial institutions, and the main characters who keep those institutions alive are fundamental constituents of any region’s history.

The projects in this research area focus primarily on Tyrol during the so-called long nineteenth century—a century of profound transformation which, for the region, is bookended by events that literally changed history, including from a legal and institutional standpoint. At one end stands the break from the Ancien Régime, the secularization of the prince-bishoprics of Trent and Brixen, and the creation of the Kronland Tirol, a new administrative unit that through a series of convulsive changes in government unified the territories of present-day Austrian Tyrol and the provinces of Bozen and Trento into a single region within the overall framework of the Habsburg Empire. At the opposite end stands the outbreak of World War I, which among its consequences brought the breakup of the Kronland, one part of which was integrated into the Austrian Republic and another part into the Kingdom of Italy.

The projects collected here dwell on specific aspects and moments of this period: the transition from the legal particularism of the Ancien Régime to a modern and uniform system of law; the creation of a new class of state officials; the reform of the legal codes and the judicial apparatus; and the rupture wrought by the revolutionary biennium of 1848–49, with the short-lived experience of the constituent assemblies in Frankfurt and Vienna/Kremsier (now Kroměříž).

This research area also includes projects that, in addition to the Tyrolean region, focus on other border regions between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries, investigating them from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective.