This paper focuses on the topic of research in constitutional history in the Czech Republic at the beginning of the 21st century, specifically in the period 2000–2015. The paper charts Czech historians’ interest in constitutional (legal) history in the region of the modern Czech Republic (including some overlaps concerning constitutional law in Central Europe) throughout the whole history of the Czech state. It is obvious that constitutional history (as well as other areas of historical research) of modern times, especially of the 19th and 20th centuries, has recently become a topic for greater discussion among scholars. However, the major editions are still more connected with older Czech history. The topic of legal history is studied at law faculties, at faculties of arts and philosophy, and at some institutes of The Czech Academy of Sciences (Institute of State and Law of the CAS, the Masaryk Institute, and the Archives of the CAS). The current paper will also treat with the professional publications (i.a. the magazine “Právněhistorické studie”), major studies, and important figures (i.a. Karel Malý, Pavel Krafl, Jiří Přibáň, Ladislav Soukup, Karolina Adamová, Jan Kuklík, Aleš Gerloch). Finally, yet importantly, the paper will point out that the “founding fathers” of the constitutional history of the 19th century (Jaromír Čelakovský and Josef Kalousek) have attracted modern scholars’ attention as well as the critical perception of legal aspects of globalisation.

The death, without a successor, of Sigismund II August on 7th July 1572 opened the epoch of free royal elections, a new phase in the history of the Polish state, marked by a checkered pattern of individual reigns and intervening interregna. Historians specializing in the late 16th century were usually attracted by these interstices, probably because they produced a number of innovations which paved the way for the establishment of the institution of electio viritim, in which all members of the nobility were eligible to vote for the future king. The reign of Stefan Batory (1st May 1576 – 12th December 1586), which filled most of the transition period between the rule of the two major royal houses, the Jagiellons and the Vasas, seems to have had less appeal, even to the historians of law and Polish parliamentarianism. A researcher of the age of Stefan Batory has to confront a number of difficulties which are not faced by those specializing in the periods directly preceding or following that reign. The main obstacle is the dearth of source material that has been printed or is readily available in the Polish archives; moreover, the some of the items that are listed in bibliographies of various studies and monographs of that segment of Polish history are difficult to trace. A thorough sifting of the archives for documentary evidence of the Sejms of 1576–1586 has produced relatively little in all respects, i.e. the circumstances attending their convocation, the preparatory work, the actual proceedings as well their legal and political consequences. The most acute problem for any research in this field is the lack of parliamentary records, or Sejm diaries – of which there are plenty for the preceding and subsequent periods. Alternatively, a searcher of Batory’s sejms, can find out what happened in those convocations from thumbnail descriptions in some contemporary chronicles or by digging up the relevant private and public correspondence, examining parliamentary speeches – some of which were printed – or by trying to infer the agenda and points of debate from the text of the acts adopted by the local sejmiks. As the main subject of my research is the legislative activity of the Polish-Lithuanian Sejm in the period 1576–1586 in the context of the legislative competences of the monarch, I extended my archive trawl to those files that could possibly include the text of both parliamentary and royal legislation, like the Libri Inscriptionum of the Polish Crown Register Metrica Regni Poloniae, volumes 113–133 as well as the inscriptions of the Cracow Land Register, housed at the Wawel Castle Branch of the National Archives. Another important source for the history of Sejms and the effects of their law-making as well as the royal legislation in the age of Stefan Batory are copies of documents that were deposited in various archives or were collected for publication. There is no comprehensive study of the Sejms convened during the reign of Stefan Batory or their legislation, nor is there much information about that chapter of parliamentary history in the historiography of the 16th century especially when compared with researches made for the preceding and following periods. However, over the last two decades the standstill has been broken by some scholars. Aditionally, some information about the Sejms proceedings and lawmaking during the Batory’s epoch can be find in the distinct studies touching the miscellaneous aspects of that time including the biographical ones.

History of Constitutionalism can show us how Constitutional law has “constituted” political realities all along history and Constitutional historians are among those who have the capacity to create more than one “constitutional history” that serves to build up very different traditions and narrations on the origins of constituent elements. The Spanish constitutional history of last years is an exceptional laboratory to study all these processes and their implications that reach their peak when dealing with the “Cadiz constitutional experiment”. As a matter of fact, the readings that the different historiographical currents did on this constitutionalism apropos its Bicentennial clearly reveal the difficulties and challenges of the recent constituent history of a country undergoing continuous constitutional revision and renewal.

Croatian constitutional historiography in the period of 2000–2015 had various focuses of interest. The author offers a systematisation of the produced works under headings reflecting the most important topics covered. The majority of works are related to research on the modernisation of Croatian institutions in the so-called “other 19th century”. A second heading collects the contributions that Croatian academics made to general and European constitutional history. The third part of the discussion is devoted to the synthesis of Croatian legal and constitutional history, and to some other contributions to Croatian constitutional history of different periods.

The review highlights the key points of Anna Stawarska-Rippel’s monograph which presents the process of codification of civil law procedure in Poland from 1918, the year of Poland’s independence, until the enactment of a revised Civil Law Code in 1964. The book is based on an impressive collection of primary data and makes full use of the literature in that field. It offers important insights into the codification processes after World War II as well as some probing reflections on the language of the law and the legal discourse. However, the analysis would have been put on firmer ground had the author defined her key terms, i.e. ‘private’ and ‘public elements’, and made clear in what way they differed from private and public interest respectively.