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hen in 1968 i looked fora suitable theme for my inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt, I found the extensive field W of the jurisdiction of the supreme courts in the German empire.1 In spite of its central importance for legal history as well as constitutional history they had for a long time been sadly neglected. The supreme courts in the Holy Roman Empire were included in the broadly negative appraisal of theancien régime, the historians of the delayed German nation-state describing its final decades as the failure of a modern, central, administrative state.With the Empire described as a weak construct in the middle of Europe that never attained the form of a modern state, then its supreme courts could hardly have been anything but ineffective and meaningless. Much was made of anecdotal evidence of this failure, especially of the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court). Good accessible sources with which to review the judicial work of the courts were sorely lacking.Norecords survived from the mediaeval royal jurisdiction. Legal historians had to track down primary sources in a considerable number of archives, which held the records from the cases in the royal courts. In the nineteenth century the records of the Imperial Chamber Court had been distributed to the states of theGermanConfederation, where a great part i • supreme courts 56 Die höchsten Gerichte und Rechtliche Zeitgeschichte 5 ‘The Supreme Courts’ and ‘Contemporary Legal History’: My scholarly works in review: A summary 3. 1 The full German essay with notes follows this précis. Bernhard Diestelkamp

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