The present volume is dedicated to Dietmar Willoweit (1936-2023), who taught from 1984 to 2004 as Professor (Ordinarius) of German and Bavarian Legal History, Civil Law, Commercial Law, and Canon Law at the University of Würzburg and served as President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities from 2006 to 2010. It brings together the papers delivered at a symposium held in his honour on 17 July 2024 in the Neubaukirche of the University of Würzburg.


The contributions focus on the concept and the emergence of law. Is it primarily authoritative law-making-such as legislation enacted by sovereign state authority-that brings legal norms into force, or is law originally, and even today at least in part, the result of an intra-societal process of legal formation? In addressing these questions, which are central to jurisprudence, the authors also engage with Dietmar Willoweit's posthumously published monograph
Rechtsdenken
(2024), in which he recalled the mutual recognition of subjective rights as a source of the emergence of law. In exploring this theme, all contributors enter into a dialogue with the scholar to whom the volume is dedicated.