International Workshop discusses Intersections of Law and History
On 13 and 14 April 2026, researchers from various disciplines gathered for the international workshop “Legal Histories of the Other”. Organised by Fellow Professor Rotem Giladi and Dr. Kim Wünschmann, the participants examined how ideas of “the other” emerge along relational self-alien boundaries negotiated in social processes of categorisation that are, in turn, embedded in distinct power structures and historical situations.
Legal histories of the other have been bound to the birth of the modern nation-state, its ideas of community membership, its increasing possibilities of participation in the polity. Moreover, empire put forward its own versions of legalised “otherness” and used law to affect inclusion and exclusion of the other and structure and maintain political authority and hierarchy. In imperial and colonial settings, ideas on culture and race were enacted to shape, determine, confirm or subvert the place, status, and entitlements of groups and individuals within the imperial legal, constitutional, and socio-political order.
Apart from Rotem Giladi and Kim Wünschmann participants included Professor Anthony D. Kauders, currently also a Fellow at the IGdJ, Professor Orna Alyagon Darr (Sapir College), Prof. Dr. Jochen von Bernstorff (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen), Michał P. Garapich (London Metropolitan University), Dr. Sebastian Gehrig (University of Sheffield), Maya Kreiner M.A. (Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture — Simon Dubnow, Leipzig), Niels Pohl-Schneeberger M.A. (Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History) and Professor Orit Rozin (Tel Aviv University).
The workshop was held in cooperation with the Alfred Toepfer Foundation F. V. S.