Digitization and Inventory of sources on judicial argument and the reaching of verdicts by high courts in the Baltic Sea region

• Applicant: Dr. Dirk Alvermann (†)
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Principles of Law and Jurisprudence ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414823978

Legal sources often form the foundation for research on the history of criminal law and for historical research on crime in correlation to daily life, mentality, and gender studies, questioning the legal practice.The recorded reasons for verdicts by the legal assessors appointed to the Tribunal of Wismar (1760-1848), as well as the files of the law faculty of Greifswald (1591-1893), can both be valued as key sources on the tradition of criminal justice, regarding not only Pomerania, but the southern Baltic Sea region in general. The legal cases of the Tribunal of Wismar originate from the Swedish fiefdoms inside the Holy Roman Empire (Swedish Pomerania and the Dominion of Wismar) and from the files of the Greifswald law faculty, thereby representing the Lübeck law which was widely adopted between Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Hamburg, Lübeck and Schleswig-Holstein. In addition, legal arguments of the lawyers at the Wismar town council between 1701 and 1872 will be included, which show the usage of the law of Lübeck and the influence of the arguments of the Greifswald law faculty on the judgements of the Wismar town council. On the other hand, those reasonings of the lawyers from Wismar form the foundation for appeals to the Tribunal of Wismar, the court of appeal for the Swedish fiefdoms in the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, this project brings together the legal opinions of three important legal instances in the Baltic Sea region in order to be inventoried and digitized particularly. Due to the pecularity of the sources, they are, up to now, only structured chronologically, or, with reference to the accusants. There is no structure so far in regards to the content, which is highly needed. This inventoring, is, on the one hand, done by supplying it with the usual descriptive structural and meta data, on the other hand, we work with automatical methods of handwritten text recognition (HTR) and of keyword spotting (KWS), in order to initiate investigation via search terms.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: Austria
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Martin Schoebel; Dr. Peter Wolff
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Nils Jörn; Dr. Günter Mühlberger