Stephen Skinner presents conference paper on law and the state in Fascist and democratic systems

On 30 June 2018 at the 5th biennial conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History, held in Paris, Stephen Skinner presented a conference paper entitled ‘Central Authority in Codified and Non-Codified Legal Systems: Law in the Shadow of the State, or the State in the Shadow of the Law?’. As part of a panel on ‘Coding Authoritarianism: Law, State, Ideology and World War II’ the paper addressed some core problems in understanding the relationship between the concept of state and the nature of law in relation to political identity, using examples from the 1930 Italian Penal Code in comparison with English criminal law and British constitutional law in the 1920s-30s. The panel also included papers by Cosmin Cercel (Nottingham) on law and authoritarianism in Antonescu’s Romania; David Fraser (Nottingham) on the status of Jews in Vichy France; and Simon Lavis (Open University) on the legal system of the Third Reich.

Further information can be found on European Society for Comparative Legal History site.