Partners involved

Universiteit Gent

General Objectives

WP2 departed from the observation that both the civil policies of the Belgian ministers of justice, and the barristers (Dutch: advocaten, French: avocats) were not yet studied in detail. This work package brought them together, because research about the ministers of justice and, most of all, their policies outside the field of criminal law and order, has shown that it was impossible to study the ministers without taking the barristers into account. Indeed, almost all ministers were or had been members of the bar, and this shaped their policies. Notwithstanding this, ministers and barristers could not be studied in the same way, because the collection of source material, research approaches and analysis were different, given the specific history of each group. Therefore, the work within this WP was organised into two subprojects.

Workprogramme

WP2a: The Belgian Ministers of Justice and their civil policies

This doctoral research project, carried out by Drs. Bram Van Dael, aimed to test and complete some of the claims put forward by Dirk Heirbaut in a 2005 exploratory study, i.e. that Belgian civil policy has most of all been one of inaction, so that the ministers can actually be considered as interchangeable, their personal histories and party affiliations being without importance. To achieve this goal, this new project has set out to conduct:

• A brief institutional exploration of the non-criminal competences of ministers of justice;
• A prosopographical study of the ministers of justice, in order to construct a profile of a minister of justice in Belgium, which then could form the background for:
• A targeted study of civil legislation, researching the ministers’ policies in detail, using the prosopographical data for a network analysis. For the latter, a twofold approach was chosen; Firstly, a general study of Belgian private law during the 19^th and 20^th centuries by D. Heirbaut to describe the wider legal background. D. Heirbaut has, for example, made a detailed study of the factors enabling or hindering codification in the field of civil law in Belgium and the Netherlands. Secondly, a study of two specific themes:

a) The history of legislation concerning civil procedure and the judicial system in general (in co-operation with the Public and private justice conferences of the Dubrovnik Interuniversitary Centre and prof. C.H. van Rhee (Maastricht)), whereby French, Dutch and Belgian experiences are being compared;

b) The history of legislation in the field of commercial law. B. Van Dael has decided to focus on the second half of the 19^th century and on themes like bankruptcy, legal persons and civil constraint. The existing research indicates great political strife in these times so that they form the best testing ground for Heirbaut’s original hypotheses.

WP2b: History of the Belgian bar

The main sources for this project, the archives of the bar councils, are hard to exploit, as they have only exceptionally been transferred to the State archives and some local bars were at first very reluctant to allow an outsider access to their archives. B. Quintelier, through perseverance, managed to get the permission from most bars to consult their archives for his research. The ‘quest’ of Quintelier and Martyn for these archives has enabled them to write the chapters on barristers, proctors and bailiffs in a new edition of the main guide for historical research in Belgium (Vanthemsche & Van den Eeckhout, eds.). As some archives contain close to nothing and others were not relevant, the decision was to taken to exploit the archives from the National Bar Association and the bars of Antwerp and Liège. Further, because the archival material turned out to be so rich, it was decided to focus on:

• the history after Belgian independence, rather than on the Dutch and the French era’s: the latter was covered by research in Lille by Hervé Leuwers (see WP6), the former by research in Amsterdam by Sjoerd Faber (see WP6).
• the institutional angle and the problem of the discipline: the procedures disciplining lawyers did not take place in a vacuum, and they can serve as mirrors of the evolutions and revolutions the Belgian bar underwent. Thus phenomena like the entrance of women into the profession, the rise of Dutch as language of law and lawyers, the shifts from the general practitioner to the specialist and from the one man office to the big law firm, can all be studied thanks to the disciplinary case material.