The European Forum of Young Legal Historians originates from the first two international sessions of young researchers, which took place in Frankfurt am Main in 1992 and 1993 with the support of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte. Since then, the event has seen a significant growth in the number of participants and the range of themes. In 1995 in Halle an der Saale (Germany), the meeting took on the format which has lasted until the present day; calling itself for the first time “European Forum of Young Legal Historians” and suggesting the new idea of a general theme. On that occasion, the adopted theme was “Legal History and the Enlightenment”. The next meetings took place in 1996, in Berlin and in 1997, in Graz (Austria). These meetings, boasting participants of various nationalities, went beyond the boundaries of the German- speaking countries for the first time, as is suggested by the proposed theme: “Laws without Borders – Borders without Laws”.

The definitive push towards internationalisation was brought about in the events held in Switzerland. In 1999, in Zurich, the Forum definitively adopted its European facet, having 120 participants from 13 countries, and in Lucerne in 2005, papers which dealt with themes of Turkish, Islamic and Caucasian legal history were presented for the first time. The progressive gain of higher numbers of participants from Central European countries gave rise to the initiative of holding the next Forums in said geographical region, leaving the German-speaking environment for the first time; an initiative reflected in the events in Budapest (2003) and Warsaw (2004). The incorporation of the Central European countries, however, seemed to coincide with a circumstantial distancing of Southern Europe, as was highlighted by the Budapest 2003 Forum review, which drew attention to the complete lack of participants from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece.

The Forum’s expansive vocation is also reflected in the proposal to assume a wider general theme which, on the one hand, invites the participants to reflect upon theory and methodology, and on the other, allows the inclusion of the broad spectrum of legal history research in progress, with no chronological limits.

In recent years the Forum’s themes have ranged between explicitly mentioning the European identity and roots of the formation of this discipline and referencing, in a wider sense, the construction of the historiographic discourse. This could be seen in the last event in Frankfurt am Main in 2006, which proposed the theme “Remembering and forgetting” and in previous events in Lucerne, Vienna, Zurich and Munich in 2005, 2001, 1999 and 1998 , when the themes were “Legal Transfer in History”, “Ad Fontes”, “Legal (Hi)stories?” and “Continuity and Rupture in European Legal History”, respectively. As in this last theme, the explicit mention of “Europe”, or its role in the construction of legal historiography, was the focus of the proposed themes of the Forums in Warsaw 2004: “The European Legal Community: between Tradition and Perspectives”, Budapest 2003: “The New Europe and its traditions” and the celebrated Osnabrück Forum in 2002: “Europe and its regions.”