part i • supreme courts • bernhard diestelkamp Battenberg edited a collection of Vorgängerprivilegien (records of precedence designed to ensure that all were assured a hearing in their own court of jurisdiction). With his critical edition of the legal sources for the Aulic Council, Wolfgang Sellert in Göttingen made them fully accessible for an empirical study of its activities. The first volume was published in 1980; the complexity of the archival material delayed publication of the second volume for a decade. The court’s common orders will be published for the first time in an edition by Peter Oestmann as his second volume. The Aulic Council’s records were in a similar state to the Imperial Chamber Court’s, but their recataloguing is now underway thanks to Wolfgang Sellert, after the academies of science in Göttingen and Vienna stepped in to share the costs of the huge project. Even though we shared out between us the complex business of preparing the publications of the Grüne Reihe, theGreen Series –Quellen und Forschungen zur Höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit imAlten Reich– it is as a group we have held meetings and conferences for high-level academic exchanges with historians and archivists. This was especially important because much as legal history after the war demanded a fresh start, so the constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire had to be re-evaluated. After the total collapse of the German nation-state in 1945, the historians of constitutional history looked on the ‘Old Reich’ in a far more positive light than their predecessors had done, turning away from the notion of an assertive central bureaucratic state at the heart of Europe. It sat better with post-war politics to appreciate the looser form of ‘the Reich’, less coercive at home and less belligerent towards its neighbours. It followed on from this new interest in constitutional history that the supreme courts of the Empire would be rated more highly, judged by criteria similar to those developed by us legal historians. No longer did we measure the imperial courts’ efficiency or importance by the number of judgements; instead, we drew attention to the mediatory effects of legal procedure. A very fruitful exchange was developed with historians such as Peter Moraw (1935–2013), Winfried Schulz (1938–1995), and Volker Press (1939–1993), and their circles. 60
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