In the recent past, it was primarily the science of public law which carefully became aware of and took note of this phenomenon of the coordination of the public and the private sphere and then integrated the legal problems involved in its thoughts and reflections on the further development of legal dogmatics. However, regulated self-regulation is not merely a contemporary phenomenon. Various forms of an interdependence between public goal settings and organised societal interests may be observed from a historical perspective, even in their legal contours. This is where the epistemological interest of legal history applies, which, especially in this field, relies on the dialogue with other historical disciplines, particularly the history of administration, economy and social policy.
The project "Regulated Self-Regulation from the Perspective of Legal History" aims to review this set of problems for the 19th and the early 20th centuries. It focuses on the analysis of the formation of legal arrangements and the discourse in science and politics, which accompanied the emergence of new as well as the modification of existing normative structures. The interest focuses on single sectors of reference of economic, social and cultural politics as well as on cross-sectional areas of legal processes of innovation, such as corporate law, the law of municipal and functional self-governance, and on the law of technology.
Questions in this context will be discussed at two conferences and documented in conference proceedings, additionally to compiling an annotated edition of sources. The conferences will approach the subject in two steps: the first conference, held 9-11 July, 2009, addresses the emergence of forms of societal self-organisation in rejecting ambitions of control by the old authoritarian state, focusing on the first half of the 19th century. The second conference, held in 2010, will analyse the modifications of forms of self-regulation at the time when the state intervened more strongly.
