This interdisciplinary international digital lecture series is offered by Freie Universität Berlin in cooperation with Tel Aviv University, The Van Leer Institute Jerusalem, The Hebrew University of Jerusalemand The Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg.

Every week, it offers co-authored papers on a key legal term by one literary and one legal scholar who have been working on this concept together. The lecture series is situated in the context of legal history, historical semantics and the instantiation of these terms in literary texts. The papers will address the interconnection of conceptual-theoretical research in the legal sphere with hermeneutical procedures of literary studies. The working hypothesis is that a conceptual approach to the significance and understanding of legal concepts can emerge from a study of the narrative form and the discourse semantics of legal terms. This approach can be used profitably for the interpretation of law and litigation – and can thus retroactively influence the interpretation of texts in literary studies in an innovative and profound manner.