Notes on Contributors
Wouter Druwé
is an associate professor of Roman Law and Legal History at ku Leuven. He studied law (Ph.D. 2018), canon law (j.c.l. 2018) and theology (b.a. 2013) at the same institution. He studies the interaction between late medieval and early modern learned law (ius commune) and legal practice, with a particular focus on the Low Countries. Recent publications concern the literary genre of consilia and decisiones, as well as the history of the law of loans and credit, of testamentary succession, and of legal education.
Randall Lesaffer
(Bruges, 1968) is professor of Legal History at ku Leuven as well as Tilburg University. From 2008 to 2012, he served as dean of Tilburg Law School and is founding co-president of the Law Schools’ Global League. His research focuses on the history of international law in early modern Europe. He is general editor of The Cambridge History of International Law and the Brill/Nijhoff and the book series Studies in the History of International Law. He is also an editor of the Journal of the History of international Law and the book series Global Law. He is the author of, among others, European Legal History: A Cultural and Political Perspective (2009) and De rechtstaat: Een geschiedenis van het Westen (2024).
Geert Sluijs
is an fwo (Research Foundation Flanders)-funded Ph.D. candidate in Legal History at ku Leuven’s Faculty of Law. He holds degrees in Law and Philosophy from ku Leuven, and Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. His current research interests include natural law thinking, legal methodology and public law in early modern Europe. He has published articles on the thought of the Leuven scholar Diodorus Tuldenus. He was awarded the Ius Commune Prize (2023) for his article “Jurisdiction and Its Attribution in the Works of Diodorus Tuldenus.”
Marie Seong-Hak Kim
is a historian and jurist in Minneapolis, USA. Author of Custom, Law, and Monarchy: A Legal History of Early Modern France (oup 2021), Constitutional Transition and the Travail of Judges: The Courts of South Korea (cup 2019), Law and Custom in Korea: Comparative Legal History (cup 2012), and Michel de L’Hôpital: The Vision of a Reformist chancellor during the French Religious Wars (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 1997), and editor of The Spirit of Korean Law: Korean Legal History in Context (Brill 2016), she is also known for her works on Japanese colonialism and comparative law.
Rafael Cronje Mateus
is lawyer and researcher, holding a Master of Laws from the Federal University of Ceará (Brasil). His research explores the philosophical and theological ideas that form the intellectual foundations of legal institutions and practices, with a particular interest in the School of Salamanca and Portuguese political thought from the medieval and early modern periods. He has published articles on various topics, including the problem of the mutability of natural law, the concept of a debt of gratitude in relation to land donations and other key issues in the field of political theology.
Jeffrey Dymond
is a COLLEGE Lecturer at Stanford University. His research focuses on European intellectual and legal history from the medieval to the early modern periods. Articles on these subjects have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, The Historical Journal, Jus Cogens, and several edited volumes on a range of themes in intellectual and legal history. He was previously a member of the European Research Council-funded project “The Just City,” based on the University of Zürich.
Pedro R.S. Santos
is a doctoral researcher at ku Leuven (2020–ongoing) whose research focuses on the emergence and emancipation of public law in the Early Modern Age. His research explores this emergence from the works of the jurist Petrus Gudelinus (1550–1619) and its framing in the ius commune. He has also contributed as Latin editor to the School of Salamanca project at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt.
Rosalind Acland
is a Ph.D. candidate in English Legal History within the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. She holds degrees in Classics (Hons) from the Universities of Newcastle and Sydney, a Juris Doctor (Distinction) from the University of New South Wales, and a Master of Law (First Class) from the University of Cambridge. She was a practicing solicitor in Australia prior to commencing her post-graduate studies. Her current research interests are early modern legal history, and the influence of classical scholarship on legal theory.
Paolo Astorri
(Ph.D.) is assistant professor of Legal History at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen, Associate Scholar at the Law and the Inner Self project (University of Cork), and Co-pi of Secrets to Patents (University of Lund). His research explores intersections of law, religion and political thought in the early modern period. His book Lutheran Theology and Contract Law in Early Modern Germany (Brill) won the RefoRc Book Award (2020). His article “Can a Judge Rely on His Private Knowledge?” received the Van Caenegem Prize for best article in comparative legal history (2022).
Lars Cyril Nørgaard
is an associate professor at the Department of Church History, University of Copenhagen. He has been affiliated with the Center for Privacy Studies (dnrf 138) in Copenhagen and awarded with an international postdoctoral fellowship from the Independent Research Foundation Denmark. His research interests the tensions between religious seclusion and societal engagement, the relationship between manuscript, text, print, paratext and image, and the interplay between early modern theology and political thinking. He has co-edited several volumes of collected essays, most recently with Michaël Green, Notions of Privacy in Early Modern Correspondence (Turnhout: Brepols, 2025).
Carlos Pérez-Crespo
is an assistant professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He was previously an adjunct lecturer of political theory at the University of Hamburg and a visiting doctoral student at the University of Cambridge. He won the 2023 Charles Schmitt Prize of the International Association for Intellectual History. His work examines the political and constitutional theories of France and Germany and their reception in Spain and Latin America. He is currently researching the international reception of political theorists and ideologues of autocracies, particularly the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt.
Signy Gutnick Allen
is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the erc-funded “Just City” research project hosted by the History Department, University of Zurich, where she works on early modern debates over justice, benevolence, and the role of the state. She has further research expertise in, and has published on, the state theory of Thomas Hobbes, the history of the philosophy of punishment, and the relationship between the history of political thought and contemporary political theory.
Sarah Limão Papa
is a certified Brazilian lawyer (ll.b. 2018, Federal University of Ceará; ll.m. 2020) and Ph.D. candidate in Law at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. She is a researcher at the erc-funded IberLAND project at Leibniz Universität Hannover. She specializes in 17th- and 18th-century colonial Brazilian legal history, with work on colonial governance, family law and canon law. Her current research investigates conflicts over communal access to land and natural resources in Portuguese America, analyzing the interplay between religion, customs, public and civil law in agrarian disputes and their connections to European legal traditions.
Alain Wijffels
(Dr.jur. Amst.; Ph.D. Cantab.; D.Litt. Cantab.) is a retired teacher of legal history and comparative law. His current research focuses on the relationship between public governance and jurisprudence in late-medieval and early modern scholarship and practice. The central theme of his work is the understanding of legal science’s original vocation as a science of the art of good public governance, both domestic and foreign. Governance of foreign affairs developed in the context of international relations and contributed therefore to the development of a law of nations, and thus to attempts at establishing an international governance.