Pro Memorie - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2022

This 2021 interview with emeritus professor Laurens Winkel from the Erasmus University at Rotterdam, shines a light on the life and work of this internationally recognized legal history scholar, born in The Hague in 1949. Professor Winkel talks about his study years, his love for history and philosophy, and his fascination for trains, underlining, modestly, how a life or career path can be the result of many coincidences. He refers to Langemeijer, Pitlo and other professors at the University of Amsterdam, and the role of Theo Mayer-Maly and his promotor Hans Ankum for his PhD on error iuris. The interviewee tells some funny anecdotes, points out how he faced some interesting international challenges during his early career, and explains how his own family history, being of Jewish descent, brought him to academically guide several promovendi on aspects of post-WWII transitional justice, and to found the Joseph Winkel Fonds voor Rechtsgeschiedenis.

This article comments on the iconography of Rubens’ sketch ‘The lawyer and death’ after Hans Holbein’s woodcut. The drawing is an example of a post-medieval dance macabre, conveying the message that all are equal in the face of death. The article discusses other examples of these dances of death, specifically concerning the legal profession. The identification of the main persona as an advocate or lawyer is called into question, due to the presence of a judicial rod.

On November 30 and the first of December 1602 a new body of law was officially promulgated by the Court of Friesland. It was an unique event and also the promulmulgated law, officialy named Statuten, Ordonnantien, ende Costumen van Frieslandt (Statutes, Ordinances and Customs of Friesland), was special. Nowhere else in the Low Countries a similar body of law was ever made. In more than 671 articles, dispersed over 89 titles and spread over four books, it stated which rules of law, promulgated in de 16th century, were still in force. When necessary these rules were brought up to date and new rules were introduced. Important was that this body law defined which rules of Roman (Civil) Law were valid in Friesland and which were not. The so called Ordinance of the country (Landsordonnantie) or Frisian Ordinance, as the promulgated law soon was named, stayed in force until she was replaced by her revision in 1723. This article gives a reconstruction of the way the Frisian Ordinance of 1602 came into being.

Making archives searchable by digitalisation and applying artificial intelligence to this will not only generate new information, but opens also the door for new questions. On basis of a case study from the Court of Friesland, the importance of this digital unlocking and method is shown: network analysis in three similar cases demonstrates and visualises the dominance of certain sources (allegations) in the network over other sources and by that the different working methods of the involved lawyers. This type of analysis is very useful to expose patterns which cannot be discerned otherwise when dealing with large quantities of civil litigation records from the Courts of Holland and Friesland. In this way until now hidden relations between names, places, dossiers and allegations, and even interprovincial links, may be revealed and lead to new investigations.

Malicious denunciation to the enemy during the war was introduced into the penal code in Belgium as a new offense against the external security of the State by a decree-law of April 8, 1917 and was punishable from April 13, 1917. The punishment itself of this, in article 121bis of the Belgian penal code determined, crime only happened from the month of November 1918. Although no indications were given for this in the decree-law or in the preliminary report to the King, the criminal justice interpreted the this article 121bis very broad after the war. This allowed heavy imprisonments (6 months to five years) to be given to persons who had denounced their fellow citizens to the German enemy, notwithstanding that this denunciation sometimes resulted in little or no harm to those fellow citizens.