Our project provides digital copies and full texts of legal sources of different provenance from the southern Baltic Sea region. How to browse and search these collections is described here. The project includes legal documents from three different legal bodies both in Wismar and in Greifswald, ranging altogether from 1580 to 1879.
The Relationen der Assessoren am Wismarer Tribunal (1746-1845) are opinions of the judges at the so called Wismar Tribunal. The Tribunal had been established as the supreme court for the Swedish Fiefdom in the Holy Roman Empire and continued to exist some time under the Prussians. At the Tribunal legal cases both from the dominion Wismar and Swedish Pomerania were heard and negotiated. The cases described and judged in the Responsa or Spruchakten der Greifswalder Juristenfakultät (1580-1800), meaning legal instructions by the Greifswald Law Faculty, came from all over the territory under Lübeck Law: all of Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Hamburg, Lübeck and up to Schleswig-Holstein.
The opinions of the judges at the Wismar Tribunal as well as the Responsa of the Greifswald Law Faculty are a maynstay of the history of criminal justice, not only in Pomerania but in the southern Baltic region in general. In Addition to those, we also make the Relationen des Wismarer Ratsgerichts (1701-1879) accessible. These are opinions of the Wismar Council Court. They can clarify how Lübeck Law and the legal notices from Greifswald Law Faculty were actually used and implemented. In the specific case they themselves form the basis for appeals to the Wismar Tribunal.
With our project we not only inventorize conception and implementation of the law by three important judical bodies in the Baltic Sea region. We also make them available online and digitally searchable.
