Iustoria 2023

Iustoria 2023

The University of Belgrade Faculty of Law is now receiving paper proposals for the      Fourth student conference on legal history – the Iustoria 2023, to be held on March 23rd-25th, 2023, its topic being “Law and Punishment”.

In 2023, it will be 150 years since corporal punishment was abolished in Serbian law, by the 1873 amendments of the Penal (Criminal) Code of 1860. To commemorate this anniversary, we wish to stimulate research related to punishment and sanctions in law. From the earliest legal history of Antiquity, all the way to the Modern Age, a large part of the law is concerned precisely with the sanctions for undesirable behaviour. Theory considers only that legal norm to be complete which prescribes a sanction in case of disobedience. First of all, a large array of subjects related to criminal law is available to our participants – on different types and subtypes of sanctions and manners of their execution, on the punishment for individual crimes and categories of crimes, as well on the purpose of punishment, which has had different aspects throughout the ages: retribution against the perpetrator, his reformation, special or general prevention, compensation for the victim… In various legal systems throughout history, different personal properties of the perpetrator and the victim could influence punishment: gender, age, belonging to a certain estate, class or caste, whether they were free persons or slaves, what their previous relationship used to be… One could also open the subjects of divine punishment, self-help and vendetta (blood feuds), talion and composition, as well as the private or public enforcement and execution of sanctions. Besides these central subjects related to criminal law, we also accept papers concerning other types of punitive norms, such as contractual penalties in the law of obligations, or the use of sanctions in international law.

All students of undergraduate and post-graduate studies pertaining to law or other humanities are eligible to apply for the conference. The applications should contain basic personal information (name and surname, faculty, department, level and year of study), along with an extended abstract containing anywhere between 500 and 1000 words. Applications are accepted in either Serbian or English.

The applications should be e-mailed to iustoria@ius.bg.ac.rs before the 15th of January, 2023. The students will be informed by the 25th of January whether or not their application has been accepted. A provisional programme for the conference will be announced by the 10th of February. For any additional information you may enquire at the same e-mail address, or consult the official Facebook page of the conference – https://www.facebook.com/iustoria

Just like on our previous conferences, apart from the presentations given by their colleagues, the students at the conference will have an opportunity to attend several lectures given by renowned experts – more details on this will be available in the final version of the programme.

The conference will be held in hybrid format: both in-person or online participation will be possible. We’ll do our best to secure accommodations either in student dorms or with student host families for participants who don’t reside in Belgrade and who wish to participate in person. These arrangements will depend on the number of available spots.

The final versions of the papers presented at the conference, with final changes and corrections submitted within a reasonable time after the conference, will be submitted for publication in the journal „Vesnik pravne istorije / Herald of Legal History“ (http://epub.ius.bg.ac.rs/index.php/Vesnik/index).

Poziv2023-en (PDF)