Migrating Legal Texts. Notes on Interpretative Categories and Juridical Translations in the Nineteenth Century

Within the history of law, we do not know of any age immune to phenomena of legal migration. Different components of legal discourse - theoretical, practical, normative - travel through time and space and mutate, sometimes assuming national physiognomies and identity functions, in close relationship with their linguistic dimension. On other occasions, the cultural transitions of law instead produce outcomes of internationalisation and standardisation of legal knowledge. Within a timeless phenomenon of global proportions, here we briefly recap the main stages of the journey along which the primary interpretative categories employed by legal historiography in the analysis of transfers of legal culture have been constructed and deconstructed, focusing on the theme of legal translations in nineteenth-century Europe, based on some examples related to the work of F.C. von Savigny.