Citation networks in administrative law books from the civil law world (nineteenth century)

This paper analyses citations of doctrine in handbooks of administrative law published in the nineteenth century in the Civil Law World – that is, Europe and Latin America. I scanned through 81 books, finding c 25,000 citations to c 5000 different texts. I built a graph with all citations to find relations of proximity and distance between different books and national groups of books. I found that French lawyers were the most cited, but they lost ground in the late nineteenth century. ‘Germans’ and, to a less extent, ‘Italians’ gained ground. Germans and Austrians constituted a mostly separated citation circuit. Spanish and Hispano Americans tended to cite Spanish and French authors but were less integrated. Italians mixed a large number of Italian references with French ones. Brazilians and Portuguese heavily cited the French. Latin Americans did not constitute a unified group. Mediterranean countries shared more characteristics and references with Latin Americans than with Germans and the Dutch. These findings challenge essentialist ideas of ‘continental law’ and ‘Latin America’.

I. Towards a broad history of administrative law: introduction Latin America does not exist; and, therefore, neither does Europe.Obviously one can see both regions on the map.What I am warning against with such a stark statement are certain perspectives that treat spatial realities as intellectual boundaries and not as the product of historical forces and identity-building processes.Efficient critiques of historiographies oriented towards the nation-state have been extensively carried out, giving rise in the 1960s to the popularity of European legal history, a strain much associated with the contemporary acceleration of European integration. 1From the 1990s, however, such perspective has been criticised for leaving out wider phenomena and being Eurocentric. 2Few alternatives have emerged: the discourse about a 'European dimension' continues to dominate scholarship.In the 2010s, Global legal history gained ground in scholarship but it strives to draw attention to transnational processes and cultural translations rather than propose actual geographical realities of inquiry. 3Latin America, though lacking some direct counterpart to 'European legal history' due to the absence of institutional forces comparable to the European Union, has seen in the last decades in general historiography some trends that seem to essentialise spatial realities, apparently unaware of the artificial, problematicand, in the origin, downright racist 4nature of the concept of 'Latin America'.
Research calls for a specific spatialisation.The toolbox of the historian must then contain several geographic levels able to highlight the complex development of social phenomena: to be understood, they must be approached from local, regional, national, transnational and global perspectives. 5I will call into attention a particular spatial reality that is frequently neglected: the Civil Law World.If the Common Law is frequently studied from an international perspectiveprobably due to the everlasting shadow of English imperialism and the economic clout of the United Statesthe Civil Law is often reduced in historical research to the law of continental Europe, 6 even though it is adopted in almost all of Latin America and in other former European colonies. 7Colonisation has been sufficiently introduced into the grand narrative of European legal history 8 ; I will, however, argue that it is possible to extend such integration beyond the independenciesand beyond even an 'expanded European legal history', for Civil Law does not 2 Douglas Osler, 'The myth of European Legal History' (1997) 16 Rechtshistorisches Journal 393. 3 Which is not a problem, only a way of tackling the problem.On Global Legal History see Thomas Duve, 'What is Global Legal History?' (2020) 8(2) Comparative Legal History 73. 4 For an interesting history and critique of 'Latin America' see Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America: Power and Allure of an Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2017). 5For a discussion on legal spaces and legal history see Pietro Costa, 'A "Spatial Turn" for Legal History?A Tentative Assessment' in Massimo Mecarelli and Maria Júlia Solla Sastre (eds), Spatial and Temporal Dimensions for Legal History: Research Experiences and Itineraries (Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, 2016). 6An example of this approach, from the very title, though authors have emphasised the colonial expansion of European law: Heikki Pihlajamäki, Markus D Dubber and Mark Godfrey (eds), The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History (Oxford UP, 2018). 7Until today the administrative law of Latin American countries is largely coterminous to the European version, with inspirations from the United States on the organization of justice.See Ricardo Perlingueiro, 'Uma perspectiva histórica da jurisdição administrativa na América Latina: tradição europeia-continental versus influência norte-americana' (2015) 2(1) Revista de Investigações Constitucionais 89. 8 An ambitious example covering the whole of European legal history can be found in Tamar Herzog, A Short History of European Law: The Last Two and a Half Millennia (Harvard UP, 2018).
belong only to Europe.It is not simply Europe beyond its borders.To do so, I will turn my eyes to administrative law.
In this paper, I investigated the citations in treatises, handbooks and textbooks of administrative law from Europe and Latin America to uncover the national and international connections making the Civil Law World.Civil Law administrative law was formed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to regulate state action and free officials from the jurisdictionalist mentality of the Ancien régime. 9It is the foremost law of the state: if even administrative law developed in an international cultural milieu, then it is safe to conclude that almost every branch of law must be analysed beyond national borders.As the administrative state expanded and turned towards an active government of society by the middle of the nineteenth century, 10 administrative law also grew and expanded.Since this phenomenon was neither national, nor even European, 11 it is reasonable to analyse its consequences in larger spaces; administrative law arrived in lands far removed from its French cradle.Scholarship was fundamental to build this branch of law that was fundamentally devoid of a code 12 through a deeply internationalised debate. 13By the end of the nineteenth century, the studies of public law were deepened and renovated, 14 going away from the mere political sciences or sciences of the state, 15 and acquired special characteristics setting them apart from private law. 16A fully-fledged general part was developed.17Most of these 9 For an introduction to the history of administrative law in general see Luca Mannori and Bernardo Sordi, Storia del Diritto Amministrativo (Laterza, 2013).developments took place in Germany and, to a lesser extent, in Italy, renovating administrative law at the turn of the century. 18This paper will then follow Civil Law administrative law from its inception to its first major methodological break.
In this paper, I will use the concept of 'country' or 'nation' instrumentally.I start from traditional geographical spaces to gather data and then assess how far they are useful to understand the cultural connections between administrative law books.I have used the descriptors 'Italy' and 'Germany' to classify authors before the unification of those states.I believe that this is a reasonable choice, for nineteenth century cultural elitesto which jurists belongwere the proponents of national identity.It is among them that we can refer to a 'nation before the state'.Moreover, I analyse only four authors from before the unifications.But three of them refer to the states-in-the-making. Lorenz von Stein's book (1870) is subtitled 'mit Vergleichung der Literatur und Gesetzgebung von Frankreich, England und Deutschland'. 19Similarly, Friedrich Franz Mayer's one (1862) refers to 'gemeinsames deutsches Recht'. 20Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1814), conversely, published his book in the Napoleonic kingdom of Italy with an annex proposing a law for legal studies 'in the kingdom of Italy'. 21o track these developments, I will use bibliometrics, in the form of an analysis of citations of doctrinal texts in textbooks.In the last years, several works have shown the value of such approach to reveal hidden phenomena in legal history. 22t can yield consequential results if coupled with digital humanities 23  analysis, 24 for instance, changing perspectives on what texts were most important to jurists in a given context. 25I will then analyse the references to doctrine in the books of administrative law.One single person could never read and adequately contextualise dozens of books and thousands of references.Thankfully the analysis of citations can highlight structural aspects of the text and pin out phenomena and research questions to be explored through a more focused reading.
Bibliometric analysis is really useful to describe and characterise scholarly communities.Distant reading26 of the sort we will develop in this paper reveals unsuspected connections: trends too big for the small eye to catch or counterintuitive developments.It can also help to transform the choice of sources from a starting point into a research question: for instance, instead of departing from a previous definition of the relevant spacesuch as Continental Europe, or Latin America -I collected data to redefine the very meaning of both of those concepts.Yet, bibliometrics has potential shortcomings we must be aware of.Citations are a proxy for thoughts, ideas or personal relations: that is, they can indicate all of those things, but they are not those realities themselves.Some authors are left uncited, some ideas are incorporated discreetly and some distinctions are too subtle to appear on the structure of the text that is revealed by distant reading.If one does not want to study citations only in and for themselves, but as an index of wider phenomena, they must be understood as a model of reality.And models are not reality itself: they must be constantly tested, refined and sometimes even ignored.For instance, looking at the bibliometric parameters of Manuel Colmeiro and Maurice Hauriou, such as nationalities of their citations, age of median citation, would suggest totally unremarkable results.But neither Colmeiro nor Hauriou were unremarkable authors, as we will see in due time.Also, a history of the meaning of citations in legal scholarship is yet to be written.Support for an authority argument, display of erudition or social deference are all possible reasons (apart from the 'use of ideas') why a text is cited.It is also of paramount importance to not fall on an anachronistic trap.Twentyfirst-century science is fully immersed in a 'bibliometric mentality' that determines the value of science by means of citations, but the past is far removed from this mind-set.Today, a single paper can cite dozens of articles, while some of the books that I analysed had only a handful of citations.Obviously, nineteenth-century jurists did not ascribe that same importance to citations.Some old books are opaque to this method.I think that bibliometrics, at least as far as historical research is concerned, are best understood not as a provider of answers but as a generator of questions.They are a point of departure, not arrival.Bibliometrics can be a tool, for instance, for selecting texts for more careful reading: if one was interested in understanding Spanish administrative law, the data presented here would highlight exceptional authors (Colmeiro and Adolfo Posada) and typical ones.Researchers might then select those authors, books or sections more interesting for their objectives.Another question would be: why did Hauriou became a consequential author, even though his bibliometric parameters were not exceptional?This might call for a comparative reading with other French authors published at the same time.Also, did foreign citations hinder or foster scholarship?One could compare Brazil, which relied heavily on them, with the Netherlands, which almost ignored what was being written outside of its borders.Not to speak of possible research comparing characteristics of handbooks, as presented here, with those of monographs, or with other branches of law, or with successive periods of time.The possibilities are almost infinite.
This paper is therefore better understood as a kick-start of further inquiry on legal spaces, on the international dynamics of legal scholarship and on the expansion of the administrative state.Yet the data itself is still important.First, we will get a general sense of the results I found after scanning through the administrative law literature of the nineteenth century.Then, we will discuss the positions of each country and how the legal spaces of administrative law were organised.

II. Transnational connections in state law: administrative law in the civil law world
Thirteen countries and 81 books from 1815 to 1899: this is the space and time in which our narrative will develop.I selected handbooks and treatises of administrative law, for in those monuments of scholarly reflection, lawyers try to depict the state of the art of the discipline, the most faithful picture of what their field of study is, or is imagined to be.Also, a sociological reason can justify this choice: students approach the discipline by the gates of handbooks as do professionals in need of updating.How did I get to the number 81?I searched for 'administrative law' in the websites of the national libraries of the main independent countries belonging to the Civil Law system in the nineteenth century, 27 using the corresponding expression in each national language.Two exceptions: Hispano-27 Whenever I found more than one edition of the same work, I looked for the oldest one that I could track down.Usually, subsequent editions update and add new information, but the general architecture and mind-set changes little.Therefore, a work is best (though not perfectly) fit in the time of its first edition.There are exceptions, especially books that are republished several times over many decades.But since few of those existed in the nineteenth century, I bypassed this issue.

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American countries and the German lands, for which I relied on a paper 28 and a book 29 that aimed to fully describe the panorama of administrative law in their respective contexts.Unfortunately, I could not track down and access all the books I found to exist 30 ; but since those that I missed usually were neither renowned nor widely cited, I think that their regretful absence will not undermine my results.A second and last limit: my own linguistic shortcomings.I found one book each from Denmark and Sweden and two from Romania, 31 none of which were written in languages that I am able to read.I chose then to exclude those four texts from my research, in the hope that in the future others will be capable to fill this void.The geographical and temporal distribution of the texts can be found in the following figure (Figure 1).
What is a citation? 32My objective with this study is to understand the cultural archive of authors, that is, which texts they read, knew or were supposed to know.I must therefore include all intellectual artifacts scholars could access.This calls for the loosest definition of citation.I have therefore counted every mention of the name of an author, even if it was not followed by a direct quotation, or even by actual engagement with the ideas present in the texts being referenced.Citation practices changed deeply throughout the century, from unstructured references in the beginning to some very formalised forms of citations in German books from the last decade of the nineteenth century.Whenever a book had been digitised on Google Books, I scanned the book manually for the individual names of authors being cited and used the search engine to find out how many times said authors had been cited.The search engine never missed out a name I had identified analogically, which gave me confidence on the method followed.
Eighty-one books that cited 4899 different texts from 25 different nationalities 25,961 times.Too much for a single person to grasp unaided.I took help from Neo4j, a software developed to perform graph analysis.After inserting the data that I got into Neo4j Browser, I got the following picture in which each node corresponds to a text, the colours vary according to nationality and the edges correspond to citations.
The graph displays a series of hairball structures.They correspond to a circle of citations arranged around a bookone of the 81 that I analysedwhich cited them.An attentive look can reveal patterns reflecting international relations between different administrative law cultures.We shall now delve into specific parts of the graph.
Figure 3 shows the connections between most Latin American scholars and their European counterparts.The typical hairball structures from other parts of Figure 2, however, are missing; a sign that most citations from this group of people are shared with representatives of other nations.In the centre, Brazilians (dark green) and the Portuguese (beige) are mostly immersed in a deep blue sea of French citations.Their legal cultures were largely dominated by the hexagon.Slightly to the right, one can see a 'red corridor' of Spanish citations.They are mostly sparse and unconnected, indicating the varying size of the Spanish network, which we will discuss later.Further right, in grey, one can see Mexican, Chilean and Argentinean books, more or less situated between Spanish, French and Latin American references.No single Latin American textual archive can be appreciated on the graph.Brazilians on the one side and Hispano-Americans on the other side, each have their separated set of references.Their relative proximity is mediated by the French, who constitute an intermediate step.To them we now turn our attention.

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French people are tightly packed on the upper part of Figure 2, Section 2. Many early authors, who sparsely cited other texts, are close to each other.In the early days of administrative law, with few texts to be read and mentioned, scholars relied on few references that, therefore, tended to be shared.Not nearby but actually in the French area, are the Belgians.They were mostly engulfed by their larger neighbours.One could imagine that they might cite a few texts from the Dutch, whose language they partially shared, or from their other large neighbours, the Germans.But both Berlin and The Hague are absent from Belgian texts.Brussel's only fascination is with Paris.On the lower left, Italians start to appear, fitting their relative proximity to the French.Although they frequently cited their transalpine neighbours, they did not shy away from discussing their peninsular colleagues.Missing from Figures 3 and 4 is the other massively important group of administrative law scholars: the Germans, shown in Figure 5. Apart from the two Austrians, 33 they are largely left by themselves, building a heavy network of common references that are shared with almost nobody else.The only hairball that somewhat moves towards the German-language fortress corresponds to the Spaniard Posada, on the far right of Figure 5. His book was published in 1897 and reflects tendencies from the early twentieth century, such as, the increase of German, Italian and national citations after the arrival of the so-called latenineteenth century metodo giuridico changes in administrative law scholarship.
Two geographic realities are missing from these images.Perhaps, the two first concepts that would come to mind if one carelessly read the title of this paper without exploring it further.Europe and Latin America: neither of them is a self-standing umbrella able of explaining the structures we have just discussed.Brazilians share with the Portuguese a Francophile environment that is only indirectly related to Mexicans, Argentinians and Chileans, which, on their turn, Comparative Legal History are separated from their Portuguese-speaking neighbour by their former Iberian colonists.The main divide dominating our image cracks administrative law scholarship along the margins of the Rhine: on the one side, the Francophile world; on the other side, the German lands, with the Dutch disseminated throughout the picture in distanced isolationism.Continental Europe is no more.Another space, bonding across the Atlantic, Brazilians, Mexicans, Belgians, Germans and the French can now be identified: The Civil Law Worldand the international diffusion of the administrative state driving its rise.

III. How each national legal culture used foreign books
No unified polity corresponds to the 'Civil Law World'.This label describes a cultural area sharing common practices and values limited by shady borders and grey areas.The nineteenth century, however, is the age of the nation-statehard power mattered.Although law is not simply a tool of state governance, it nevertheless cannot be disentangled from state politics after the revolutionary cleavages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.More so for administrative law, the foremost regulator of state activity.We must then track down the national developments in the countries analysed to better grasp the meaning of the general image we have just discussed.Administrative law during the nineteenth century can be read for the purposes of this paper as the story of the French position vis-à-vis other countries, coupled with their dichotomy with the Germans.As a matter of fact, France and Germany were somewhat exceptional as their authors mostly cited other French and Germans, respectively, as Figure 6 shows, contrary to the international outlook of most other legal cultures.In the early nineteenth century, administrative law was still a young field of scholarship, meaning that there was little to be cited and, apart from the two central countries, scholars relied heavily in international references.French authors, conversely, had only a restricted interest in foreign legislation even when writing in law reviews, 34 which are expected to be at the forefront of scholarship.Around France, coalesced a 'Francophile' world, to which I have alluded and that can be seen in Figure 7. Latin Americans, the Portuguese and Belgians heavily cited the French.Spanish and Italians were more lukewarm towards France, dividing their attention between the French and domestic authors; while the German lands (including the Dutch), 35 conversely, rarely looked beyond the Rhine.
Olivier Jouanjan, describing the Belle Époque scholarship of administrative law, endorses the French-German dichotomy. 36For him, different styles  developed in either side of the Germanic-Romance languages divide.In Germany, the strong institutional connection between constitutional and administrative law favoured systematic thinking within the synthesis of Staatsrecht.In France, conversely, constitutional law was a latecomer.Moreover, the strong influence of the Conseil d'État steered doctrine towards more topical thinking.Though France remained a strong catalyst of administrative thinking, the growing prestige of German universities at the turn of the century also helped to spread a 'German model'.While French centres of learning were little more than professional schools until the turn of the century, Germany pioneered the unity of research and teaching, creating what would be latter known as the research university. 37he centrality of research enabled professors to produce more and the intellectual culture to be more vibrant, which might explain the lure of all things German by the end of the century.France, though still a cultural behemoth, did not escape these circumstances.By the late nineteenth century, intellectual exchanges between the two large neighbours were intense when it came to legal books and ideas. 38But the approach could be confrontational; many ideas of French public law were developed in opposition to German scholarship. 39This might also be related with the general malaise spawned among the French intellectual classes after the defeat in the 1871 war and the deep resentment therein produced against Germany. 40French people and Germans, deeply connected, were also in constant opposition.The latter was a new, rising power, the former was a seemingly decadent cultural force and both nations commanded respect from other European and Latin American intellectuals.But the ascendancy of one nation frequently came at the expense of the force of the other.
Dialectics begets dynamism.The force relations between French, German and national scholarships changed as they developed over time.In the beginning of the nineteenth century, France was the sole leader as European administrative law had been born precisely in that land and French culture and law were seen and promoted as the pinnacle of 'civilization', 41 especially in Latin America and southern Europe.However, as time passed by, French jurists had to compete for attention with other bodies of literature and, in the last three decades of the century, with growing assertiveness from the recently unified Germans, as displayed in Figure 8.
The French decrease is striking, as is the rise of 'national' literatures.The German trajectory is more gradual, bearing more fruits in the early days of the twentieth centuryprobably due to the late establishment of a German state and a correspondingly unified administrative law.
Were the French doomed to lose ground as more and more books from other lands started to be published?Was this a natural development as administrative law started to be explicitly regulated and taught in an ever-growing number of countries?Or shall we explore other causes for this striking phenomenon?One might wonder that, after the initial push of Joseph-Marie de Gerando, Louis Antoine Macarel, Firmin Laferrière and others, French administrative law started to lose vigour, while the innovative nucleus of the Civil Law World moved towards Italy and Germany.How can we prove or disprove such a claim?I have devised two metrics that might be helpful: the age of publication of the median citation in a given book and citation density in a given book.The former is calculated arranging the dates of publication of the texts cited in each book I analysed in crescent order, then finding the median and finally subtracting the result from the date of publication of the book being analysed.The result is a proxy for the up-to-datedness of the book analysed: the smaller the result, the more recent are the references used by the authorsuggesting that the scholarship being used is more attuned to recent trends.I chose to use the median and not the mean because the latter might eschew the results too far if a given author heavily cited classical authors, especially Greek and Roman ones.The second metric, citation density, corresponds to the ratio between the total number of citations and an estimate 42 of the total number of words in the book, multiplied by 10,000. 43The results are given in Figures 9 and 10, both for selected countries.
Decadence is a strong word.I will instead suggest that there is a 'loss of vitality' in French scholarship; one that is supported by both figures.The age of the median citation in French books pass from under 20 years in the beginning of the century to more than 30.Meanwhile, German books, all of which were published after 1857, steadily hovers around 10 years.Italian and Spanish books, which were by no means globally dominant, follow the French trend indicating that the new German scholarship started to follow a different path from those of other European countries after the 1860sat least in what concerns citation practices.German authors were citing more recent publications, suggesting that they were up to date with recent trends in scholarship.Meanwhile, the density of citations in French books remained consistently low, rarely surpassing the 10 citations/ 10,000 words threshold.Germans, on the contrary, cited an ever-greater number of Figure 9. Age of the citation in books of administrative law.Each dot corresponds to a book, the y-axis corresponds to the age of the median citation and the xaxis corresponds to the year of publication of the book.The first Italian author, Romagnosi, was excluded for being an outlier (age of median citation = 250 years).42 I estimated the total number of words by determining a mean between the number of words in three pages I randomly choose at the beginning, middle and end of each book.I chose pages without tiles, subtitles or too many footnotes.The value obtained was multiplied by the total number of textual pages of the book, indexes being excluded.

43
I chose this value because it is comparable to the size of contemporary scientific articles.
Comparative Legal History references, often even more than 40 citations/10,000 words.An interesting finding were Brazilian and Portuguese authors, which consistently cited more abundantly than their French and Italian counterparts.Perhaps both this and their reliance on France spawn from singular causes, such as an openness to the outside world and a weakness of the internal academic book market (some might add a barely hidden poshness of its Francophile jurists to the explanatory pot).
Italians occupied a more intermediate position.They clearly were not cited as often as the French and Germans.Although they referred too much to themselves, they were not as isolated as the Dutch.Figure 11, showing the nationalities of citations in Italian books, gives a better sense of the relative position of Italian scholarship.
By mid-century, French presence was intensely felt, but it faded away by the late 1800s.This might be a signal either of close-mindedness or of a consistent internal debate.Both factors were probably at play since Italian books comprise both relevant scholars and little-known names barely recognizable beyond the limits of the peninsula.Triaca, for instance, which cited mostly Italian authors, was actually meant to be a manual for technical institutes and was deliberately conceived in opposition to the perceived excess of the technicism of previous Italian literature. 44Most of the Italian legal science from the late nineteenth  Francesco Triaca, Elementi di Diritto Amministrativo (Hoepli, 1884) vi: 'Per verità i trattati in materia non fanno difetto; ma l'operetta eccellente del Manna è affatto teoretica, e quelle del De Gioannis e del Meucci, per accennare solamente le più recenti, sono troppo voluminose per coloro ai quali, como agli alunni degli istituti tecnici del regno, basta una cognizione sommaria delle nostre istituzioni amministrative'.On the Italian literature of administrative law for technical institutes see Giulio Cianferroti, Storia dela Letteratura century was a mix of textual exegesis of statutes and political-philosophical vagrancies.Public and especially administrative law begged for foundations.If this eclectic openness might have directed Italians towards transalpine references, then the nationalistic tendencies in the post-unitarian environment and the statist views of law constrained the eyes of scholars to remain within national borders. 45Giovanni De Gioannis Gianquinto even gave a lecture defending that Italian administrative law should concentrate on its own traditions and avoid foreign intrusions. 46Italians kept an ambivalent attitude towards foreign authors.One must wait until Vittorio Emanuele Orlando for a change of direction that would firmly steer Italian administrative sciences towards the 'legal method'. 47rance and the nationals: a similar position can be found in Spain and the Hispano-American republics.On both sides of the Atlantic, the Spanish-speaking world was mostly divided between citations to France 48 and to Spain itself, constituting a more or less coherent cultural space. 49One can see this in Figures 12  and 13.Contemporary observers were conscious of this phenomenon.Teodósio Lares, the first Latin American administrative-law scholar, for instance, explicitly stated that he compared the legislation of his country to that of France to show that Mexican laws followed its counterpart, 'the most civilised nation of Europe'. 50amón Ferrera, the author of the only Argentinian book analysed here, 51 stated that there was no other literature than that from the 'European constitutional monarchies' 52showing that he was not aware of Brazilian and Mexican books.The historian Alfredo Anabitarte, commenting on the Spanish case, believed that the Spanish were most interested in the French system of administrative centralisation, rather than French doctrine itself. 53The centralist model was useful to the political aspirations of the mostly conservative authors from before 1850.But this does not deny the strong French presence one can see on the next figures.
Why 1850?The main transformation in the doctrinal history of administrative law in the Spanish speaking world was the publication of the book of Manuel Colmeiro precisely in that year, followed by at least three other editions.This work became a reference for years to come, forming a 'Colmeirista tradition' in the Hispanic-speaking area.The Mexican José María del Castillo Vellasco mentions that his own book followed the method of Colmeiro at every corner when he found the Spanish scholar to be right.He also made long citations of his beloved counterpart up to five continuous pages one time. 54The Chilean Santiago Prado55 remarked that whenever he did not declare who had authored a statement he transcribed, it was to be understood that the information had been taken from Colmeiro. 56anuel Cruzado refers that the Spanish author had been adopted for at least three years as the textbook for the National Law School of Mexico. 57And not only Latin Americans revered Colmeiro: Francisco Cañamaque from Spain, author of a book on administrative law 'for the working class' within the series Biblioteca Enciclopédica Popular Ilustrada (Illustrated Popular Encyclopaedic Library), stated that he relied heavily on 'the wise man Colmeiro, without whom it is almost impossible to do anything right or useful for administrative law.His books are the teachers of those who, like me, must learn'. 58This 'Colmeirista tradition' would only be superseded in 1897, when Posada published his book.He still used many Spanish and French authors, but he also cited copiously both Germans and Italians, following a trend that has already been observed in Brazil for the first decades of the twentieth century.Judging by a similar study of early twentieth century Brazilian books, 59 he might have given rise to what might be called 'Posadista tradition'.Fittingly, Posada is the most cited author (four in 17 citations) by Abraham Fernández de Soto, the only Colombian in my sample and the only Hispano American book to be published after Posada's one. 60Apparently, also in Spain, 1900 represented a relevant break from nineteenth century citation practices.
Colmeiromania was the reflection of a rather common phenomenon.Frequently, when authors wanted to give an introductory overview of the administrative law of another nation, they relied on a single author meant to testify the whole foreign legal culture under discussion.The Portuguese Joaquim Thomaz Lobo D'Ávila, 61 for instance, used exclusively the Viscount of Uruguay (Paulino José Soares de Sousa) to depict Brazilian law. 62Being the circulation of 'good' legal books from abroad generally limited, apart for a few cases -I am mostly thinking about France63 the few that actually reached the hands of authors 56 This connection between Chilean and Spanish scholarship has already been noticed: Rolando Pantoja Bauza 'El entronque hispánico de la doctrina chilena de Derecho administrativo ' (1961)  were probably squeezed to exhaustion for as much information as possible.The result were rather narrow images of other legal cultures.
Nineteenth-century administrative law doctrine was sustained by a notably connected network.French scholarship was by far the most produced and the most cited.From the beginning of the century when there were few options for reliable information, to the late nineteenth century, when competition with Germans and Italians started to take pace, French scholarship saw its prestige somewhat shaken.The French were a central point of reference, but the hexagon was not anymore necessarily the undeniable cradle of innovation.
vGerman scholarship had to face a late start.Its first book was published only in 1857, later even than Mexico, contemporary to Brazil.Due to the late formation of the German state, there was no single German administrative law, but only the laws of each independent German principality or kingdom.However, the strong German culture, university structure and book market surely made their effects be felt beyond their linguistic and future political borders.In the last quarter of the century, from central Europe a new administrative law arose to establish a strong position in the international scene.But its most important fruits could only come to be in the early twentieth century.The majority of scholars on the opposing side of the Rhine could not read the language of Goethe and the self-referentiality of most Germans limited the scope of their works.In the early twentieth century, though, German books would start to be widely cited.One must analyse the role played by Otto Mayer, who wrote about French administrative law and whose handbook on German administrative law was translated into French.
Italy was in a similar position, though the language barrier was absent.Though they were more connected to the rest of the Civil Law World, many of the books produced in the peninsula had few academic aspirations, something that certainly limited their usefulness.
Spain and Hispano-America constituted a single unity, which heavily cited both French and Spanish authors and coalesced around the work of Colmeiro.Brazilians and the Portuguese shared a pronounced taste for French books.Belgians were largely absorbed into France 64 and Austria, into Germany.The Dutch remained on their own.So far, we have discussed nations, as if they had their own personalities, tastes and inclinations.Now, I will write about men.
IV.The canon: most important authors and their nationalities in each legal culture Nations are too general concepts to fully grasp the movements of ideas and texts.Which were the jurists most cited in administrative law books of the nineteenth century?
Though useful, it can be limiting to simply list those that received the most citations in each book from my sample.We will be pursuing the cornerstones of a field of study.To do so, I will work with the concept of 'canon'; that is, the list of authors and texts cited by most of the members of a certain intellectual community.I proposed a methodology to define and analyse this idea.I suggest that the concept be separated in two levels: the canon proper, which will be defined as the group of authors and texts cited by at least ¾ of the books in a given sample; and the sub-canon, which comprises authors and texts cited by between ½ and ¾ of the books.I calculated the canon and sub-canon of each country, since, as already said, the national level still played a deeply important role in the dynamics of administrative law scholarship.Moreover, since books from different countries could be quite heterogeneous, actually no general canon was formed: no single text was cited by more than 37 books in my sample, falling short even of the 50% threshold I established for the sub-canon.
To better visualise what the canon is, I used the program Neo4j Bloom.I generated images for each national group of books and then manipulated them, moving the books that I have read to the corners of the image.This left at the centre the texts cited by most of the authors who I analysedthat is, the canon according to the definition I suggested.In Figures 14-16 one can find examples of a simple canon (Brazil); a complex canon (Germany) and the absence of canon (the Netherlands), respectively.
Each 'national' canon tended to be made up of a few 'national' authors and some French ones.The proportion of each component varied, from the heavily Germanic canon of the German-speaking world to the almost exclusively French canons of Portugal, Brazil and Spain.All of this is put together in Tables 1 and 2. Appendix Table A2 provides a sort of 'meta-canon', listing authors that belonged to either the canon or sub-canon of at least two countries.There was not that much direct sharing of authors between canons.One characteristic they had in common, however, was to always include at least one of the 'founding fathers' of French administrative law, though the actual text cited varied.Most of these central works were published in the 1830s and 1840s, a 'golden period' of French administrative law.Those were Macarel, Gerando and Laferrière, the reference milestones that emerged after the early years of trial and error.But few relevant books would go to French presses after those  Comparative Legal History founding fathers until Hauriou published his own treatise in 1893. 65Germans, in addition, retained some authors from Police Science from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi, Robert von Mohl and Joseph von Sonnenfeldsthough belonging to past paradigms, they were still mentioned until the eve of the twentieth century.Yet, most of the German canon was comprised of nineteenth-century German authors.
'Canon' is a grandiloquent term, evoking importance, omnipresence and inevitability.But it is far from certain what is the impact of authors cited by everyone.Frequently, those referenced the most are read the least. 66These works are mere names carelessly being passed through in a rosary of erudition more useful to elicit intellectual legitimacy than to ground reasoning.'Founding fathers', the most frequent presence of the 'meta-canon' I have just referred to, are particularly prone to fall prey to this risk.What was the actual impact of the canon?To answer this question, Figure 17 reports the percentage of citations to the canon in the total citations of each book.
Most books had a significant, though not majoritarian, participation of the canon, which hovered around 15% and 40%.Yet, some national peculiarities appear.Both Brazilians and Belgians are almost always near or beyond the  threshold of 40%, reflecting their over-reliance on a small pool of mostly French authors from the early days of administrative law.Spanish authors, on the contrary, frequently appear on the lower end of the scale of importance of the canon, reflecting the already discussed lack of unity in the books published in Spain.But the most interesting exercise, once more, seems to be to compare the trajectory of French and German authors.Germans tended to have 25% of their citations directed to their (rather long) canon, at least suggesting that the scholarship they developed had a strong nucleus of references providing problems, arguments and debates.French authors, conversely, changed over time.At the dawn of administrative law, the canon was unmeasurably important in the hexagon.Louis Jean Horace-Degouy 67 and R Gandillot 68 devoted all their citations to authors belonging either to the canon or sub-canon of French administrative law.Towards the end of the century, however, the figures became almost inverted.Many books count citations to the canon as less than 10% of their total number of references.This downwards trajectory is consistent with the already described 'decadence' of French administrative law, which seems to lose momentum in the late nineteenth century.Less significance of the canon might indicate a less tight scholarship struggling to establish common 'research' programs and an overall direction.
Analysing the canon can help us to understand the thrust of a disciplinary community, the most important ideas being discussed (either accepted or rejected) and, most importantly, can indicate the style of thought.In nineteenth-century administrative law, early and mid-century French administrative lawyers held (relative) sway over several 'national' cultures, helping to establish what was understood as administrative law well into the nineteenth century.But these references, and French scholarship as a whole, were getting older by the day, opening space for the ascension of Italian, German and domestic authors in the early twentieth century.
V. Between france, germany and the world: conclusions Age of empires, age of the bourgeoisie, age of lawof State law.During the nineteenth century, the State acquires a long-fought objective, one that was building up for centuries but, until then, had been no more than a half-achieved conquest: the almost total dominion over law.Administrative law is a consequence of this fight.The foremost legal base of the State.Yet, scholarship almost always tends to be international.As we saw in this paper, not even administrative law could be contained by borders.
Borders, however, that must be redefined.Legal spaces do not necessarily coincide with the limitsreal or imaginedimposed by cultural programs and political ambitions.Instead of Europe and Latin America, we found a richer, more

10
António Manuel Hespanha, 'O direito administrativo como emergência de um governo activo (c 1800-c 1910)' (2005) 26 Revista de história das ideias 119.11 On comparative history of administrative law from a methodological standpoint see Bernardo Sordi, 'The Time Dimension in Comparative Research' in Peter Cane, Herwig CH Hofmann, Eric C Ip and Peter L Lindseth (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Administrative Law (Oxford UP, 2021).12 On the role of doctrine in administrative law see Pierre Legendre, 'La facture historique des systèmes: notations pour une histoire comparative du droit administrative français' (1971) 23 Revue Internationale de Droit Comparé 5; Bernardo Sordi, 'Sur la valeur normative de la doctrine juridique dans le système administratif' (2014) 60 Droits 169; John Bell, 'The Role of Doctrinal Writing in Creating Administrative Law: France and England Compared' (2018) Glossae: European journal of legal history 140.13 For example, on the reception of European administrative law in Brazil see Walter Guandalini Júnior, 'A tradução do conceito de direito administrativo pela cultura jurídica brasileira do século XIX' (2019) 74 Revista da Faculdade de Direito da UFMG 473.14 On renovated administrative law see François Burdeau, Histoire du Droit Administratif (Presses Universitaires de France, 1995) 199-250.

24
Hylkje de Jong and Gijs van Dijk, 'Network Analysis in Legal History: An Example from the Court of Friesland' (2022) 90 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 250. 25 Tommaso Agnolini and Ugo Pagallo, 'The Case Law of the Italian Constitutional Court, Its Power Laws, and the Web of Scholarly Opinions' [2015] ICAIL '15: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law 151.

Figure 1 .
Figure1.Date of publication of books in my sample.Date of first edition considered.For the sake of simplicity, nations with similar characteristics were presented as one: Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Chile (Hispanic Americans), Portugal and Belgium (Romancespeaking countries heavily influenced by France) and Netherlands and Austria (Germanicspeaking countries apart from Germany).

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Network of citations in administrative law books from the Civil Law World.

Figure 6 .
Figure 6.Percentages of citations of domestic authors.Made with Excel Maps 3D.Contemporary borders.

Figure 7 .
Figure 7. Percentages of citations of French authors.Made with Excel Maps 3D.Contemporary borders.

Figure 8 .
Figure 8. Distribution of citations by nationality in books from non-central countries.By non-central, I mean all countries represented in my sample apart from France, Germany and Italy.

Figure 10 .
Figure 10.Number of citations in each book per 10,000 words. 44

Figure 11 .
Figure 11.Nationalities of citations in Italian books arranged in chronological order.

Figure 12 .
Figure 12.Nationalities of citations in Spanish books of administrative law arranged in chronological order.

Figure 13 .
Figure 13.Nationalities of citations in Latin American books of administrative law arranged in chronological order.

Figure 14 .
Figure 14.Citations in Brazilian books of administrative law.Canon highlighted.

Figure 15 .
Figure 15.Citations in German books of administrative law.Colour meanings equal to Figure 14.

Figure 16 .
Figure 16.Citations in Dutch books of administrative law.Observe the absence of canon.Colour meanings equal to Figure 14.

Figure 17 .
Figure17.Percentage of citations in each book that were made to texts belonging to the canon of the country to which the author belonged.Each dot represents a book and its colour represent the nationality of the author of said book.

Table 2 .
Nationalities of authors present in the canon and sub-canon of each national group of administrative law books I analysed.Note: Columns correspond to the nations whose canons I am analysing and lines corresponds to the nationalities of authors in the canons.

Table A2 .
Texts appearing in at least two canons.