BOOK REVIEW: Maris KÖPCKE, A Short History of Legal Validity and Invalidity. Foundations of Public and Private Law (Forum Historiae Iuris)

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I reviewed the book of Maris Köpcke, A Short History of Legal Validity and Invalidity. Foundations of Public and Private Law (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2019) for the Forum Historiae Iuris.

First paragraph:

This book (as the title indicates) is a short and breath-taking overview of the history of validity in Western legal culture from Roman law to constitutional control.1Köpcke tackles an essential normative problem: what is the role of lawyers’ ‘intentional say-so’ (8) in changing ‘legal positions’? How did the ‘legal technique’ (p. 3) of validity originate in private law, to assess or empower legal ‘transactions’ (translation of Savigny’s Rechtsgeschäft)? If transactions (contract, testament) exist in their own, validity is the technique used by lawyers to restrain or remove them. Hence private law’s initial focus on invalidity (8). How did it develop in the ius commune, and, finally, how did it apply to public decisions (administrative adjudication) and law-making (judicial review)? Constitutionalism (implying the precedence of fundamental norms over legislation) is presented as ‘just another sense’ of the ‘long-standing technique’ of validity (7).

The full text is available in open access here.