https://www.academia.edu/168360706/_The_Law_as_a_Frontier_Process_and_Difference_in_Medieval_Polands_Polish_and_German_Law_Courts_Krakowskie_Studia_z_Historii_Pa%C5%84stwa_i_Prawa_18_2025_129_171?email_work_card=title
The frontier ranges in meaning between the literal—a zone of physical separation—and the abstract—a difference across a gradient of high-order cultural attributes. In medieval Poland, one such attribute was the law: drawn as a sharp distinction between “Polish” and “German” law, two comparable yet substantively different legal systems. This article explores this frontier through close examination of judicial cases, in what I designate here as “Polish” and “German” courts. The source material is hundreds of stories about what happened in courts, embedded in charters and in records of Kraków’s civic court, spanning the years 1280–1370. The article opens with a survey of these courts (as they appear in that source material), then closely compares the court cases along their full course on the two sides of the supposed ethnic divide. The result is a wide range of similarity, analogy, and difference in the working of those courts. Rather than two sharply distinct legal systems, “Polish” and “German” courts comprised a complex, internally varied institutional universe. Within that universe, curiously invisible is transformative influence—diffusion—across the frontier from one side to the other—above all, from "German" to "Polish" courts. ****** This article is under Open Access; as is, in its entirety, the journal of legal history, published at the Jagiellonian University, where the article appears. The journal mixes publication in Polish with original (not translated!) publication in other languages, above all English. I cannot recommend it strongly enough, for quality as a source of literature, and as a publishing venue.
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