This digital edition aims to make the genesis of the Austrian Federal Constitutional Law in the 1920s more comprehensible and accessible for detailed research through important historical sources. For this purpose, the preserved drafts of the constitution are critically edited and made available along with transcriptions and digital facsimiles. Furthermore, historical sources that are directly related to the creation and discursive negotiation of the legal text – such as meeting minutes – are transcribed and made accessible along with digitized versions. Additionally, each historical document is accompanied by a commentary explaining legal-historical and genetic phenomena and contexts. New commentaries or improved transcriptions are continuously added to ensure rapid access to the latest findings. An extended use of the collected data as a linguistic corpus is in preparation.
The application is being developed within the framework of the international and interdisciplinary DFG/FWF project The Creation of the Federal Constitutional Law of 1920, a joint project of the Institute for Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna, the Institute for Political Science and Philosophy of Law at the University of Freiburg, and the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, bringing together various institutions.
The dataset – approximately 70 TEI/XML-encoded source documents along with additional commentaries and metadata – is made available online in a resource-efficient and sustainable manner using a static site model developed by ACDH.
