Arme Vrouwe Justitia

Eerst de blinddoek, vervolgens de grijze staar

Samenvatting

On the 29th of November 2019, Bram Van Hofstraeten delivered his inaugural lecture while accepting his appointment as endowed professor of Limburgish Legal History (LGOG). In the oration, Van Hofstraeten critically assessed all the existing literature on the so-called Great Litigation Decline, an assumed pan-European phenomenon characterized by a strong decline in civil litigation during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After demonstrating the shortcomings of the methodologies used so far in order to decide upon the actual existence of such decline in civil litigation, Van Hofstraeten concluded that up till now there is no guarantee that such a decline actually took place in Europe. By means of a new methodology applied to civil procedures brought before the Maastricht Indivies Laaggerecht between 1430 and 1800, Van Hofstraeten discovered that a real Giant Litigation Decline already started at the end of the fifteenth century and lasted for about three centuries. Subsequently, he discusses possible explanations for the enormously high number of civil procedures during the second half of the fifteenth century and the decrease in civil litigation that followed afterwards.