Katja Škrubej

Having pursued her studies in Law, as well as History and Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the University of Ljubljana, Katja Škrubej completed her master thesis on Slovene legally relevant terminology in the translation of the Bible (1584) by Jurij Dalmatin (DAAD  scholarship; Institut für Slawistik, Universität Würzburg, 1998), as well as her dissertation on RItus gentis of Slavs in the Eastern Alps, with the focus on Freising manuscripts (ZRC, ZRC SAZU: Ljubljana, 2002), at the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law, by methodologically drawing from all three disciplines (with Radoslav Katičić, Universität Wien, as the head of commission for the defence). The phenomenon of (natural) terminologisation (enabling the underlying institutionalisation of legally-relevant relations) would remain one of her key topics, with researches into legal performativity and legal semiotics, whereby the concept of "performative slovenika" as a tool to grasp the orally transmitted (and performed) legally relevant concepts (in the sense of Walter J. Ong's secondary orality) as her main contribution (see "Uradovalna slovenika" in Bibliography). Of the two post-doc scholarship awarded, she accepted the one by University of Michigan School of Law at Ann Arbor (the other being Hauser Global Scholarship at NYU). In Ann Arbor, she attended private tutorials in cuneiform with Gary Beckman (with a nod to his predecessor in researching the Hittite international treaties, Viktor Korošec, a cuneiform scholar from our own Legal Historical Department of University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law). With William Ian Miller, her host in Ann Arbor, as well as with Joseph H.H. Weiler (NYU), she would go on to develop a rewarding collaboration, with the first as her guest at several summer schools for her students on the old Icelandic law and with the latter as a co-editor and co-author of the Law and Revolution: past Experiences, future Challenges (Routledge, 2024, in Bibliography). In 2015, she won a guest researcher grant at Max Planck Institute for European Legal history with the project "Legal spaces in Alps-Adriatic Area around 1800: the Agents of Institutionalisation, Disappearance, Resistance and Transformation", after being invited to the Institute's Summer School twice before by his Director Michael Stolleis. Having presented her "legal spaces" as a conceptual tool to overcome the anachronistic transplanting of a modern concept of "state" into historic situations at a series of lectures of the Société d'histoire du droit in Paris in 2017 http://www.societehistoiredudroit.com/pdfs/Affiche_SHD_2016-2017.pdf, as well, she published it in German in 2022 (see in Bibliography below). Three years before, she helped to co-organise the society's "Journées internationales de Ljubljana 2014" Société d’histoire du droit SHD – Journées - Archives  (societehistoiredudroit.com). She also took part at several bilateral symposia of long standing with legal history colleagues from the University of Poitiers, as well as participated in the scope of the joint legal-historical masters' programme of Paris-Cité and Pantheon-Sorbonne in 2023 https://univ-droit.fr/recherche/actualites-de-la-recherche/manifestations/47006-histoire-de-la-pensee-juridique-moderne-4. At the University of Ljubljana Faculty of Law, she teaches a first-year course in Legal History, and three elective courses that she introduced to the curriculum in the course of the last ten years. Having conceived and co-organised an international symposium »Magna Carta 1215: Parallels and Influences» in 2015 in Ljubljana with John Hudson (the author of The Oxford History of the  Laws of England, Vol II., 871-1216; 2012) https://arhiv.pf.uni-lj.si/media/programme.22.06.2015.2.pdf, honoring the 800 years of Magna Carta, she successfuly introduced "History of English Law" as the new elective course, the other two being "Law and Language in European Legal History" which alternates with the newest one on "Law, Image and Film in Legal History". With her students, she especially enjoys participating in an international pilot project of the EUTOPIA University Alliance Collective Learning Community "Legal History" https://eutopialegalhistory.blogspot.com/ since 2022.