Law and Time – Some observations from a Legal Historical Perspective

Andreas Thier, University of Zurich

Obviously, there is a close relationship between time and law: Legal norms make timekeeping rules generally binding on social communities. Conversely, time is an important dimension of meaning for law and jurisprudence. Legal norms often become understandable and applicable only through their reference to dimensions of time, such as the reference to "past" and "future" or "delay" and "acceleration". The historical interrelations between time and temporality on the one hand and law and legal knowledge on the other will be examined in more detail using the example of the transitions from the European Middle Ages to the European Early Modern Period. In a first step, the reform of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 will be considered as the introduction of a temporal order, the implementation of which illustrates the intertwining of the development of law and the interpretation of time with contemporary religious and political tensions. In a second step, I will argue how the change in historical perspectives should also affect legitimation approaches and conceptions of legal order. Thus, the historicization of Roman law and later of canon law was to make room for the emergence of new approaches to legal order in the jurisprudence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time, the period of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries was to become a phase of intense debate about different histories of the origins of legal orders of political rule. However, the period between about 1450 and 1750 also saw significant changes in the way law and jurisprudence dealt with the future and what was to come. This will be examined in the third section, using the example of futures trading on the stock exchange and the law of insurance. The emergence of a new culture of risk and risk control, first conceptualized in the late Middle Ages, is common to both areas of law. However, the rise of futures trading and the development of stock exchange regulations also demonstrate the growing importance of "speculation" as a perception of the future, which increasingly became the subject of legal assessment. Such phenomena should also be reflected to some extent in the shaping of insurance law. Taken as a whole, these observations show that time cannot be understood as a neutral quantity, especially in relation to law, but is always a point of reference for normatively guided interpretations.
 

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