Digital Legal History

Digital legal history is, for me, a field-building enterprise as much as a research practice. The central conviction is that early modern police ordinances — the tens of thousands of normative texts regulating everyday life in the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, France, Scandinavia, and beyond — have never been studied comparatively at scale, because the tools and infrastructure to do so did not exist. Building those tools is part of the scholarly contribution.

Three projects define this work. RHONDA (Research in Historical Ordinances and Normative Data) is an international online community developing a controlled, multilingual vocabulary for the subject matter of police ordinances — a Policeymaterien ontology that allows comparison across language barriers without flattening local idioms into a single modern taxonomy. The classification schema has been published in the Journal for Digital Legal History and is being applied to corpora from Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia.

The Journal for Digital Legal History, which I co-edit with Dirk Heirbaut and Florenz Volkaert (UGent), provides open-access publication infrastructure for the field. It publishes research that combines legal-historical questions with digital methods, and has become the primary venue for work on early modern normative sources from a computational perspective.

The Entangled Histories dataset — 107 books of ordinances from the Low Countries, produced during the NWO Rubicon project at Ghent University — provided the first openly available machine-readable corpus of this material, and demonstrated both the possibilities and the methodological difficulties of working with HTR-transcribed legal texts at scale.

I publish in the Journal for Digital Legal History, DSH, JDMDH, and the BMGN.

Related projects