In late Ottoman South-Eastern Europe, traditional Ottoman law, court systems and court personnel on the one hand, and ultra-modern French and German/Austrian law on the other, clashed. Thus, more than ever before, this region lay on the "tectonic boundary" of several legal continental shelves. This location makes South Eastern Europe a laboratory in which elements from different legal cultures coexist, mutually influence each other and merge with each other: A legal space characterised by plurality and hybridity, which due to these characteristics ultimately appears more modern than the - at least supposedly - homogeneous legal areas on the individual legal continental shelves.

Prof. Dr. Martin Löhnig ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Bürgerliches Recht, Deutsche und Europäische Rechtsgeschichte sowie Kirchenrecht an der Universität Regensburg.