The University of Belgrade Faculty of Law is now receiving paper proposals for the Fifth student conference on legal history – the Iustoria 2024, to be held on March 25^th-27^th, 2024, its topic being “Legal Transplants throughout History”.

In 2024, it will be 50 years since the publication of the book “Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law” by the famous Scottish-American legal historian, honorary doctor of the University of Belgrade, Alan Watson (1933-2018). On the occasion of this anniversary, we want to open numerous questions, both perpetual and modern. On the one hand, the phenomenon of borrowing and reception of foreign law has been known since antiquity, and the term “transplanting” was used even by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). On the other hand, Watson’s theory emphasised the importance of individuals and circumstances, even mere chance, in the choice of the law to be transplanted and the way of its adaptation, and thus caused controversies that continue to this day. Our goal is to gather the works of young authors who analyse legal transplants in different periods and legal systems, from the borrowing of individual institutions to entire codifications. We welcome papers that discuss the reception process, the factors that influenced the choice of a foreign model, the adaptation of the transplanted law to domestic conditions, the quality of the transplant, the specifics of its application in practice… We also accept papers that deal with the phenomenon of legal transplants from a theoretical point of view, especially if they rely on historical examples in their analysis.

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 15^th of January, 2024. The students will be informed by the 25^th of January whether or not their application has been accepted. For any additional information you may enquire at the same e-mail address, and important news will also be published at 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).