In recent years, there has been a deepening convergence between scholarship on global intellectual history and on legal history. To take just one example, a recent book on international law, by Arnulf Becker Lorca (2014), carries “global intellectual history” in its subtitle—a stance related to the author's emphasis on the constitutive role in the field of non-European legal actors. A sustained reflection on the convergence between legal studies and global intellectual history, however, still remains a desideratum, at least in the sense that we do not yet have even a basic platform where scholars with different space/time and (trans-) cultural specialization come together to reflect on how studying legal concepts gains from global intellectual history. This forum, which results from a conference organized at Heidelberg University in 2016, attempts a preliminary intervention here. The introductory remarks are not meant to be conclusive; they invite responses. [Read the full Introduction]

1. Law, Empire, and Global Intellectual History: An Introduction
    Milinda Banerjee and Kerstin Von Lingen

2. Property and Political Norms: Hanafi Juristic Discourse in Agrarian Bengal
    Andrew Sartori

3. Sovereignty as a Motor of Global Conceptual Travel: Sanskritic Equivalents of “Law” in Bengali Discursive Production
    Milinda Banerjee  

4. Legal Flows: Contributions of Exiled Lawyers Toward the Concept of ‘Crimes Against Humanity’ During the Second World War
    Kerstin Von Lingen

5. Liberalism, Cultural Particularism, and the Rule of Law in Modern East Asia: The Anti-Confucian Essentialisms of Chen Duxiu and Fukuzawa Yukichi Compared
    Kiri Paramore

6. Autonomy and Decentralization in the Global Imperial Crisis: The Russian Empire and Soviet Union in 1905–1924
    Ivan Sablin and Alexander Semyonov

7. Jewish Modern Law and Legalism in a Global Age: The Case of Rabbi Joseph Karo
    Roni Weinstein