The Organising Committee of the 5^th Biennal Conference and the Executive Council of the European Society for Comparative Legal History are pleased to call for papers for the upcoming conference to be held. The main theme picks up threads of thought from the earlier ESCLH conferences in Valencia (2010), Amsterdam (2012), Macerata (2014) and Gdansk (2016) to explore what codes and codification have meant and continue to mean for legal systems with codes, and for those without. Papers should be submitted, as set out below, by 15 November 2017.

The conference will focus on the issue of codes or alternatives to codes as instruments of transforming laws in Europe and in the world. While codes, and the process of codification, are at least familiar if not always completely understood, this conference challenges us to look deeper at what a code meant for the legal systems affected by it. The conference seeks to understand the whole process of codification, from political aspects to its conception, agreement and roll-out, through to technical matters of drafting and implementation and even to linguistic matters of expression and deeper meanings. Challenging the importance for legal rules to be inserted within or outside a code, the conference proposes to examine all sorts of codes, and not only the most known civil codes: general codes as special (such as penal, commercial, labour, family, military) codes, officious codes as official codes. The conference seeks also to study the effects the codified structure of the norms could have on their content and on the way law functions, notably through case law and law writing. All the historical situations in which law reform took place outside of codification and outside of codes can be questioned could be relevant in helping us to understand law reform through codes or its alternatives.

Papers should be novel, properly researched and referenced. They should address the conference theme, exploring doctrinal, theoretical, cultural or methodological aspects of comparative legal history. They must also be comparative, addressing more than one system of laws. The organisers particularly welcome addressing multiple legal systems or cultures. This includes where a similar legal system functions in different cultural circles.

Practical details:

1. To offer a paper, please send the title of their paper, a short abstract (of 200-400 word, absolutely no more and a short CV (no more than 1 page) by 15 November 2017 to the organizing committee, c/o jean-louis.halperin@ens.fr.
2. The presentations should be in English.
3. It is also possible to submit a complete proposal for one or more panels (3 papers normally).
4. The list of accepted papers will be announced by 8 December 2017.

Shortly, a conference website will be launched with fuller details of the conference. For the moment, some transport and accommodation information follows.

Paris offers many accommodation possibilities ranging from five-star hotels, through smaller hotels in the Quartier latin and private rooms to beds in youth and student hostels. For some postgraduates the Ecole Normale Supérieure could offer cheaper accommodation in student dormitories.