Description: In late Ottoman South-Eastern Europe, traditional Ottoman law, court systems and court personnel on the one hand, and ultra-modern French and German/Austrian law on the other, clashed. Thus, more than ever before, this region lay on the "tectonic boundary" of several legal continental shelves. This location makes South Eastern Europe a laboratory in which elements from different legal cultures coexist, mutually influence each other and merge with each other: A legal space characterised by plurality and hybridity, which due to these characteristics ultimately appears more modern than the - at least supposedly - homogeneous legal areas on the individual legal continental shelves.
Brief description: Prof. Dr. Martin Lohnig is Full Professor for Civil Law, European Legal History and Canon Law at the University of Regensburg. Dr. Ivelina Masheva is a researcher in the Institute for Historical Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and currently (2020-2023) a post-doc researcher in the Central European University in Vienna. She obtained her doctoral degree at Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" (2015) with a dissertation on Tanzimat commercial law reforms in Ottoman Bulgaria.