Remarks at the Opening of the Symposium Celebrating the 10^th Anniversary of the German Law Journal — Positioning German Scholarship in the Global Arena: The Transformative Project of the German Law Journal

Extract

The 10th anniversary of the German Law Journal marks ten years of a seminal project to transform legal scholarship and adapt it to globalization.

As the transnational sphere becomes dominant, globalization means more than interdependence. It entails profound change to the academic systems as currently understood. These systems were formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as national institutions. Academics were (and often still are) public servants; future academics — particularly those representing the interests of the state in core areas like education, law, forestry, and theology — can only become public servants after they undergo state examinations. National institutions have financed academic scholarship in order to achieve effective administration, national fame, and economic profit. Accordingly, academic scholarship organized itself into national associations, nurtured national publication bodies, whose public voice spoke in the mother tongue. Certainly, international contacts were maintained with varying intensity, and comparative law has had an enduring and prominent history in many legal fields. However, these contacts had a national foundation that largely determined orientation, style, media, means, career and reputation. Under the bell jar of the nation state, national academic communities developed strikingly individual characteristics.