Ik schreef een bijdrage voor het Tijdschrift voor Mensenrechten over de Weimargrondwet en fundamentele rechten, ter gelegenheid van de derde editie van mijn handboek Gestolde Macht. Historische en Vergelijkende Inleiding tot het Publiekrecht (Owl Press, 2025).
Lees het artikel hier: 10.21825/tvmr.96283.
I uploaded a dataset on Zenodo.
Transcription (generated with Transkribus, manually corrected and tagged) of an undated copy of Goswin Arnould de Wynants' Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs Bas, initially written in Vienna in 1730 (239 images). Wynants was a member (since 1717) of the High Council for the Austrian Netherlands, an advisory organ to Emperor Charles VI (1711-1740). Trained as a lawyer in Leuven, he had been an attorney and councillor (judge) at the Council of Brabant before. Wynants describes the institutional and constitutional, but also commercial and judicial organisation of the provinces of the Spanish (from 1713 on, Austrian) Netherlands, from the late Middle Ages on. The work is written in an informal style, and is addressed at his second son. However, numerous references to doctrine (mostly the canon lawyer Van Espen), print source publications (e.g. Butkens, Du Lauri), manuscripts and archival pieces make it an exceptional guide through the Southern Low Countries in the early eighteenth century. The reasoning is legal-institutional throughout the work, with an emphasis on the application of legal maxims to specific situations. Wynants illustrates how the High Council acts as a 'censor' for relevant decisions the sovereign has not delegated to the governor-general. I refer to a generic chapter on Wynants (2023) and a longer article on his treatment of jurisdiction and taxation (2025). The latter contribution includes a discussion of the various versions and copies of the manuscript found in Antwerp (Conscience Heritage Library), Ghent (Ghent University Library) and Brussels (KBR). THe XML-document is the transcription of a copy, not an original. A draft of Pierre Delsaerdt's annotated transcription of the original (Belgian State Archives, Manuscripts, 829, provisional version 1989), kept at the HHStA (Vienna; SB NL Elisabeth Kovacs 40-11) has been consulted. This was useful to resolve issues (e.g. words or syllables partially obscured by a fold in the bound volume), but the reader ought to keep in mind that I transcribed a... copy, whereby the (unknown) copiist has made grammatical and spelling errors, simplified or inverted formulations or made mistakes in dates. Evident mistakes in dates (where the chronology does not fit) have been corrected, using Delsaerdt's transcription of the manuscript kept at the Belgian State Archives, as well as the latter and the copy kept at Ghent University Library. The transcription has been tagged in Transkribus, which can be consulted in the Transkribus PDF in this dataset. I used the following categories: (1) Person (e.g. Archduke Albert, Archduke Leopold [Wilhelm], Duke of Arenberg and Aarschot, Mary of Burgundy, Charles V, Philip II, Prince Eugène) [orange] (2) Place (e.g. Mons, Antwerp, Malines, Ireland, Vienna) [purple]. A visualisation of the Mémoires' spatial reach can be consulted here on Google Maps. (3) Institutional concept (e.g. loi fondamentale, souveraineté, emploi, fief) [blue] (4) Organisation (e.g. Conseil Privé, Conseil d'Etat, Conseil Suprême, Gouverneur Général) [green] (5) Date [dark blue] (6) Treaty (e.g. Barrier Treaty, Peace of Rastatt, Peace of Utrecht, Peace of Westphalia) [orange] The tags have been extracted and added as an appendix to the Transkribus PDF. Within Transkribus, links have been made to Wikidata. Unfortunately, they can only function when the documents are integrated into Transkribus Sites, which is not yet the case. The scanned version of the copy transcribed here can, however, be accessed on the Conscience Library's server (cf. infra). Alongside the XML and PDF files, I have also attached a MS Word version of the transcription, which may be more convenient for the reader. PDF and Word file alike allow for simple text searches in the corpus, e.g. "Sa Majesté" (285 occurences), "Placcard" (55), "Conseil Privé" (54), "Possession" (23), "Commerce" (23), "Etats de Brabant" (44), "Flandre" (103), Zypaeus, Zaman, François L'Honoré, [Jean] Dumont, Cicero, Lamoignon, Hovines, Bergeyck, "Parlement de Paris", "Cour de Rome"... My thanks go to the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library (City of Antwerp, especially dr. Marie-Charlotte Le Bailly), which graciously allowed me to consult the document. The copy transcribed here can be accessed digitally on the Library's server. I was assisted in 2020-2021 by two research students (Max Van den Bosch and Leen Elewaut) in training a manual HTR-model. They operated with the Research Group Contextual Research in Law (CORE) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Department Interdisciplinary Studies of Law). I am equally grateful to the Stichting tot Uitgaaf der Bronnen van het Oud-Vaderlands Recht (OVR), which awarded me the 2020-2021 OVR Chair (at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, collega proximus Prof. dr. mr. H. de Jong) and supported the effort by granting the remained of the chair's budget as a one-off subvention for Transkribus credits.
Consult or download here: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18326096.
Abstract:
This article examines two French printed sources that reflect on the Spanish monarchy under Philip V (1700–1746): Gaspard Réal de Curban’s La Science du Gouvernement (1760–1764) and the Mémoires of the abbé de Montgon (1748–1753). The former seeks to label and classify Philip V’s realm through a broad comparative approach encompassing public law, the law of nations, and what would today be described as political science. The latter, by contrast, offers a detailed (subjective and lively) ex post narrative of court intrigues and secret diplomacy between Versailles and San Ildefonso. While the former situates well-known episodes -such as Ripperda’s extraction from William Stanhope’s residence- or institutions -such as the organisation of colonial trade- against the backdrop of the developing European law of nations, the latter reveals the lived reality of a transnational court society, in which female actors and confessors could weave together multiple strands of influence.
Read the full article here in open acces.
This article delves into three manuscript essays kept at the Archives Diplomatiques of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (La Courneuve), ascribed to Nicolas-Louis Le Dran (1687–1774), top civil servant in the French foreign office (bureaux des affaires étrangères) under Louis xv. Not unlike Antoine ii Pecquet’s 1757 Esprit des maximes politiques pour servir de suite à l’Esprit des Loix du Président de Montesquieu, these unpublished reflections quote Grotius’s ibp, probably in its 1724 translation by Jean Barbeyrac (and to a lesser extent Montesquieu and Pufendorf) as well as historical literature to argue for the necessary restraint in starting and waging a war. Although Le Dran had not studied law and his citation practices may lack refinement, his engagement with Grotius aligns with the broader mission of early modern jurists a latere principis: to offer moral and value-driven foundations for good governance, rather than to draw on technicalities.
Read the article here: DOI 10.1163/18760759-46010011.
Ik sprak met Jorn Lelong (De Morgen) over binnen- en buitenland vanuit het perspectief van het Élysée. Lees het stuk hier.
Volume LIX van de Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor de Uitgave van Oude Wetten en Verordeningen van België is verschenen. Uw dienaar verzorgde een langere bijdrage over de manuscripten van Goswin-Arnould de Wynants (1661-1732), vooraanstaand jurist in het begin van de achttiende eeuw.
Abstract:
Goswin-Arnould de Wynants (1661-1732), councillor (judge) in the Council of Brabant, and member of the High Council for the Netherlands in Vienna appointed by emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire, was one of the most privileged observers of law and administration in the Spanish and then Austrian Netherlands at the turn of the eighteenth century. Most of his work has never been published, although copies of his manuscripts circulated relatively widely and can be found in various Belgian heritage institutions. Although Wynants is a reference for nineteenth- and early twentieth century legal historians, scholarship in legal history seems to have forgotten both the author and the eighteenth century in the Southern Netherlands. Part of the explanation lies with Wynants’s informal writing style and lack of explicit references, which render his work less suitable for handwritten text recognition and computational legal history. However, a traditional close reading highlights his extensive use of implicit legal reasoning and elements of broader legal culture. Building on the work of Ben Croon (1991) and the institutional study of Klaas Van Gelder (2016) as well as the comprehensive study of public law manuscripts of Martin Schennach for the Holy Roman Empire (2020), two of Wynants’s main works are analysed. First -for the battle over jurisdiction between secular and ecclesiastical power- his Memoirs on the institutions of the Austrian Netherlands. Secondly, the treatise on taxation in Brabant. Although it is still solid to see Wynants as a ‘regalist’ (Croon), defending the secular ruler against ecclesiastical competition and fiscal exemptions, this image has to be complemented. In fine, Wynants primarily defends the judge as a crucial actor in the early modern legal ‘cacophony’ of legal sources and languages (Herzog 2024).
Het volledige volume verschijnt in open access op rechtsreeks.be in de loop van de maand januari. De met HTR gedigitaliseerde Mémoires over de instellingen (waarover ik eerder publiceerde) worden dan ook open access op Zenodo geplaatst.
Edit 6 I 2026: raadpleegbaar in open access hier (ISBN 9782960272451) en hier: DOI 10.2139/ssrn.6033414.
Ik sprak met Ruth Joos in de Ochtend (VRT Radio 1) en met Mathieu Lonbois voor Het Kwartier (VRT NWS) over de opsluiting van Nicolas Sarkozy in de gevangenis La Santé.
