Making the Austrian Federal Constitution 1920

The Austrian Federal Constitutional Law (Bundes-Verfassungsgesetz 1920, B-VG) was adopted by the Austrian parliament on 1 October 1920 and is still in force today, despite more than 130 amendments in the intervening century. Therefore, the creation process of the constitution is important not just for (legal) historians, but also for academic jurists and practising lawyers. While this process has been documented many times and while there are several editions of relevant texts, these are fundamentally deficient and incomplete, especially on the basis of the standards of modern legal historical and editorial scholarship. This has created much confusion in research and has left a significant number of questions unanswered. The project will publish online, open access and open source all important sources and texts relating to the process of drafting the B-VG and will do so commensurate with the modern scholarly standards for editorial and legal-historical scholarship. The project is an international and interdisciplinary endeavour; it requires not only legal and historical knowledge, but also knowledge of editing techniques and of digital humanities. The sources will be retrieved from the archives, reviewed, scanned and published online as facsimiles. The scanned documents will be converted into machine-readable full text (XML) using Transkribus software and then proofread. The scholarly commentary to the documents will be both text-critical and legalhistorical in nature. Therefore, the respective documents will be analysed regarding their origin, genesis and external form and compared with other documents for matches and deviations. They will also be analysed with regard to their content, their authors and aims and goals as well as their effects, in particular their significance for the creation of the B-VG. The proposed project will both edit the known texts anew, aiming to avoid the errors of previous editions while making them accessible online, as well as actively search for as-yet unknown sources. In brief: the entire process of the creation of the B-VG will be examined in a much more precise, comprehensive and accessible manner than in previous research and publications. The project is an Austro-German weave FWF (lead) and DFG (partner) collaboration, with work to be carried out partly in Austria and partly in Germany. Thomas Olechowski (Vienna) is FWF PI and leader of the Austrian team; Jörg Kammerhofer (Freiburg) is DFG PI and leader of the German team; Alexandra N. Lenz (Vienna) is National Research Partner for digital humanities.