Raluca Enescu

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ph.D. in Criminology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Residence: November 1, 2012 - August 31, 2013

Profile

This project analyzes decisions involving deaf people in civil and criminal cases in Germany between 1879 and World War I, the first period of activity of the Reichsgericht or Imperial Court of Justice. The Court was the highest civil and criminal authority in the German Empire, using a common Criminal Code passed in 1871 and the unified Civil Code of 1900, which contained provisions on the deaf in the areas of contractual obligations, family law, and inheritance law. The Court’s main role was to unify the legal practice within the twenty-seven territories of the newly unified German Empire. Five court case decisions relating to deaf people provide insights into the motives of the Court. The judges’ argumentations reveal medical, philosophical, and educational concerns, and their decisions articulate their understanding of deaf people’s legal capacity. The limitation of the role of the deaf in the judicial system shows how the law contributes to shaping society’s definitions of the “normal” citizen granted full legal capacity, and allows us to examine which cultural norms interact with court cases to produce the legal role of the deaf. The project is part of the research group on "The Construction of Norms in the 17th- to 19th-Century Europe and the United States".

Raluca Enescu investigates courts and judges operating in different legal systems and periods. Her interests include the use of congruence theory in the verdict choice and the sentencing process, the history of forensic knowledge in criminal trials and the transformation of facts in proofs associated with the notion of evidential probative value. The conflict of disciplines such as sociology, psychology, medicine and law is central in each of her projects.

While teaching research methods and statistics, Raluca Enescu worked successively as a researcher at the Institute of Psychology, the School of Criminal Justice and the Faculty of Biology and Medicine of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She has been a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Humanities of the Free University Berlin and a visiting researcher at the Department of International and Comparative Criminal Law of the University of Hamburg, which she will join again at the end of her stay at the MPIWG.

Her research projects have been supported by the Foundation Erna Hamburger, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs. She is a member of the European Society of Criminology and of the European Association of Psychology and Law. She publishes regularly in the Swiss Journal of Criminology, the Revue Internationale de Criminologie et de Police Technique et Scientifique and in Jusletter.

Current work

The Legal Capacity of the Deaf in the Decisions of the Imperial Court of Justice