Bruno Debaenst

Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor Docent at Department of Law; Professors, Instructors, Researchers

Telephone:
+46 73 469 78 32
E-mail:
Bruno.Debaenst@jur.uu.se
Visiting address:
Trädgårdsgatan 1, Trädgårdsgatan 20
Postal address:
Box 512
751 20 UPPSALA

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CV:
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Short presentation

Greetings! I am a Flemish legal historian. Since 2018, I have held the position of "lektor" and "docent i rättshistoria" (senior lecturer and associate professor in legal history) at the Law Faculty of Uppsala University. My research pursuits encompass Belgian, Swedish, and comparative legal history.

My name is pronounced in Swedish as "Debånst"

Keywords

  • legal history

Biography

I hold academic qualifications in history (1999), law (2003), and criminology (2006).

From 2003 to 2008, I gained professional experience as an attorney (advocaat) at the Ghent Bar.

In 2005, I was appointed full-time assistant at the Ghent Institute for Legal History (Instituut voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, Faculty of Law), where I specialized in legal history.

In 2006, I commenced doctoral research on the juridification of workplace accidents in nineteenth-century Belgium. I successfully defended my dissertation in 2010, more than a year before the conclusion of my assistantship.

In 2012, I was awarded a three-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, FWO).

In 2015–2016, I served as Guest Professor at Ghent University.

Since 2018, I have been employed at Uppsala University as Senior Lecturer (lektor) and Associate Professor (docent) in Legal History.

In 2022, I spent six months in the United States as Uppsala’s visiting professor at the University of Minnesota School of Law.

In 2025, I was awarded the title of Distinguished University Teacher (excellent lärare).

Research

My ongoing research is structured around three principal research axes:

Research Axis I: The History of Belgian and International Social Law

This research axis formed the core of my doctoral project (2006–2010) and my postdoctoral research (2010–2015). Since taking up my position in Sweden, I have continued to develop this line of inquiry while expanding it to encompass new themes.

For example, on 5–6 May 2023, I participated—at the invitation of Professor Thorsten Keiser—in the conference Lohngerechtigkeit in Giessen, Germany, in recognition of my expertise in the history of Belgian social law.

In 2024, BEGASOZ (the Belgian Association for Labour Law and Social Security Law) invited me to contribute a legal-historical article to its biennial conference, Law at the Service of Social Progress. I co-authored this article with my former doctoral student, Jasper Van de Woestijne, a specialist in the history of social law.

I have also continued my research on international organizations. In this context, I participated in the ISLSSL XIV European Regional Congress, which resulted in an English-language publication with Springer. In addition, I collaborated with Brazilian colleagues, leading to two Portuguese-language publications co-authored with Moise Alves Soares.

In 2025, I published two book chapters in Dutch on the history of Belgian social law: one on the history of the labour courts in Belgium, and another—co-authored with Professor Patrick Humblet, emeritus professor of labour law at Ghent University and a specialist in strike law—on the criminal repression of strikers in Belgium.

Research Axis II: General Belgian Legal History

My second research axis concerns general Belgian legal history. Since 2018, I have explored a wide range of new topics within this field.

In 2019, I participated in an international conference in Helsinki on legal aid, where I delivered a lecture and subsequently contributed a book chapter on the history of legal aid in Belgium. In 2020, I authored a chapter on Belgian legal culture for the volume Comparing Legal Cultures, edited by Søren Koch and Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde. A revised version of this chapter was later published in 2023 by Springer in a volume edited by Søren Koch and Marius Kjøllstad.

I was also invited on two occasions by the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Germany). The first invitation involved participation in a research project on conflict resolution, which resulted in a German-language chapter on the history of conflict resolution in Belgium. The second initiative brought together European and Latin American legal historians and led to my article The Tower of Babelgium, which examines the legal-historical implications of Belgium’s complex linguistic landscape.

During my tenure as visiting professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, I collaborated closely with Professor Ryan Greenwood, Rare Books Librarian. I discovered that the library held several copies of Praxis Rerum Criminalium, authored by the sixteenth-century Flemish criminal lawyer Joost de Damhoudere. Observing that the work constituted a plagiarized version of an earlier manuscript, I discussed these findings in a podcast, which subsequently developed into two peer-reviewed scholarly articles—one in Dutch and one in English.

Research Axis III: Swedish Legal History

Upon commencing my position in Sweden, I naturally became engaged in Swedish legal history, initially through my teaching. A substantial component of our course in comparative legal history (komparativ rättshistoria) concerns Swedish legal history. Through sustained engagement with the literature, leading seminars, assessing examinations, and reviewing more than 2,000 student papers on a broad range of legal-historical topics, Swedish legal history has become an integral part of my scholarly expertise.

Between the autumn of 2020 and the autumn of 2025, I supervised 35 master’s theses in legal history at Uppsala University, the majority of which addressed topics in Swedish legal history. I regard such supervision as a form of “grey research”: although students conduct much of the empirical investigation, the supervisor actively guides the research process, engages critically with sources and interpretations, and contributes intellectually to overcoming methodological and analytical challenges. In this sense, supervision constitutes a form of research by proxy.

I have also conducted independent research and published in the field of Swedish legal history. In 2019, I contributed an English-language article to the vänbok in honour of my predecessor, Carl Gustaf Spangenberg. In December 2023, I was invited by the Association des historiens des facultés de droit (France) to participate in a conference in Paris on the state of legal history in Sweden. The event consisted of five round-table discussions addressing, inter alia, legal-historical research and teaching in Sweden. My contribution, written in French, is forthcoming.

In 2026, I published an article in Swedish on the teaching of legal history in Uppsala and Sweden in the faculty yearbook. I also contributed to the vänbok for Marianne Dahlén with a chapter entitled Legal Her-Story (in English), focusing on the position of women in Swedish legal history teaching.

Several of my publications have emerged directly from my teaching. An English-language article on public opinion and its role in the Rechtsstaat originated in discussions in my advanced course on Historical Trials. Another English-language article, on legal futurology from a legal-historical perspective—published in the journal Rechtskultur—developed from a lecture I have delivered annually since 2019.

In addition, I have published scholarly articles in Swedish on Swedish legal history. Within the field of constitutional history, I authored an article on the prehistory of the 1974 Instrument of Government (RF 1974) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. I also published an article on the history of environmental law in Sweden in 2025 in the vänbok for Professor Charlotta Zetterberg. In this contribution, I examined a field that has thus far received limited attention from both legal historians and environmental law scholars.

Bruno Debaenst

Publications

Selection of publications

Recent publications

All publications

Articles in journal

Books

Chapters in book

Collections (editor)

Monograph doctoral thesis

Other

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