The foundations were laid in 2004 with a bilingual and a multidisciplinary scientific manifesto for investing in a new field of research: the History of Justice as a key element of a democratic state and society (D. Heirbaut, X. Rousseaux, K. Velle, 2004). It took the form of a collective volume Politieke en sociale geschiedenis van justitie in België van 1830 tot heden / Histoire socio-politique de la justice en Belgique de 1830 à nos jours. This work resulted from an exploratory study in which all the Belgian partners in the network took part, and pointed out a considerable number of flagrant lacunae in the research.

In order to tackle the incomplete and fragmented nature of scientific knowledge on the history of Belgian justice, all the partners expressed the need for the development of concerted research efforts, while at the same time, the collaboration achieved by them was felt to be a success and strongly encouraging for further partnerships. However, the construction of a joint research program bringing together the research power of several universities and two linguistic communities is not the most evident undertaking. In Belgium, research in the field of political and social history and the field of legal studies remains to be organised within seperate faculties and to be funded and disseminated mainly within different university structures and at regional levels. The IAP program was, therefore, enthusiastically welcomed by the partners as an unique opportunity to move beyond these traditional frontiers and translate their research goals into actions.

The general objectives for the research programme were thus:

• to address several of the lacunae in the existing knowledge of the field (among others, the history of civil law policy; the history of the judicial professions; prison history and penal policies; police history; the relationships between justice and society; …)
• to conduct integrated and in-depth fundamental research in order to realise a complete, critical and structured synthesis
• to move beyond the judicial paradigm on the methodological level

For its first five-year phase, the project focused on four thematic fields, studied over the long term (1830-2005): civil justice (legal history), penal justice (historical criminology), prosopography of the judicial world (socio-political history) and sources (archival science). They were complemented with transversal views on key periods of the history of Belgian justice: the origins (Revolutions 1795-1830), and the World Wars (the 1914-1950 wartimes), necessitating specialised expertise: modern history, contemporary history, legal history, and sociology. Concerns of interdisciplinarity led the team to propose a methodological approach that moved beyond the juridical paradigm: instead of historical analysis of law as an autonomous given, the partners opted for a socio-historical approach whereby processes of judicial change were not studied in isolation, but rather in their relations to other factors of social change. The historical sources provide unique material for the uncovering of major tendencies in perceptions of justice, when interpreted in the light of sociological and political theory. Further, use of research methods of the social and political sciences, especially quantitative methods, was made to stimulate critical access to major statistical series that had seldom been compared, were unreliable, relatively inaccessible or less-well known.