Main Page

🇵🇱 Polski

About the project Database introduction Database Filtry Katalogi

About the project

LawRus Database is a scientific research project funded by the Polish National Science Centre (OPUS NCN project no. 2025/57/B/HS3/02198; project title: „Rus Chronicles as source of common law"), led by Prof. dr hab. Adrian Jusupović.

The main goal of the project is to conduct comparative analysis of the Rus common law (as precedential and customary norms) preserved in the Rus chronicles (letopisi) between the 10th and 13th centuries, and of how those legal precedents were used in later documents from the territory of Rus – that is, present-day Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland. Existing research has, on the one hand, failed to reflect innovative scientific approaches to interrogating these sources and, on the other hand, incorporated only a fraction of the information available concerning the law and customs of Rus. Most researchers have instead concentrated their research on strictly defined legal texts (e.g. Russkaia Pravda, the so-called "Rus Truth"), while also mostly ignoring narrative sources. Moving beyond these earlier limitations, this project will unlock a whole new field of research.

The Database will use published editions of Cyrillic chronicles alongside Latin, Scandinavian, and Greek sources as comparators. In these texts we will explore attestations of both law (including, for example, international, civil, property, and religious law), as well as customary practices. Relevant extracts will subsequently be translated into English and Polish to make them more accessible to the international scholarly community. This research has three key objectives:

1. An open-access LawRus Database (digital source edition), or digital repository of legal historical sources in a Mediawiki format, created in cooperation with IT specialists from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IH PAS). The long-term preservation of this Database on a IH PAS server is another key objective. The Database will be made available for contributions from interested researchers at the end of the project funding period, but it will be available as a work-in-progress from the first year onwards.
2. An international conference in 2028, bringing together specialists on Slavic law and customary practice to encourage further research on the legal history of the Middle Ages.
3. Publications, including articles in English and other languages in leading European journals. We plan to publish our case studies on law and customary practice, and the project will likely result in more than one book publication.

Research team

Principal Investigator

Prof. dr hab. Adrian Jusupović PhD (2011, University of Warsaw), Habilitation (2018), full Professor (2023). He is a professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His main research interests are medieval Rus, source study, source editing, prosopography, and seals. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of ten monographs and over 100 other scholarly works, published in Polish, English, German, French, Ukrainian and Russian. He is also the co-editor of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle (Romanovichi Chronicle) [MPH ns, vol. XVI], as well as a translation of this primary source. The initiator of the international conference "Worlds of the Slavs", inaugurated in 2020, which became a regular biennial event. He is also one of the editors of the Brill series Worlds of the Slavs.

Researchers

	Prof. dr hab. Dariusz Dąbrowski Head of the Department of Auxiliary Sciences of History at the Faculty of History of the Kazimierz the Great University in Bydgoszcz. He graduated from the Department of History and Protection of Cultural Property at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. His main research interests include the genealogy of the Rurikovichi dynasty, the social history and culture of medieval Rus, accounts of medieval Rusian and Polish rulers, and the history of museums in Poland. He is the author of seven monographs (including two translated into Russian and Ukrainian) and over 140 other scholarly works, published in over a dozen countries. He is also the co-editor of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle (Romanovichi Chronicle) [MPH ns, vol. XVI]. A fan of Italian baroque opera, hardcore music, and travelling throughout Europe and Central Asia.
	Dr hab. Aliaksandr Hrusha, prof. IH PAN Professor at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialises in the study of writing culture and law, Cyrillic palaeography, diplomatics of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the medieval and early modern periods, and editing documentary sources.
	Dr hab. Aleksander Paroń, prof. IAIE PAN Professor at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He graduated in history and classical philology from the University of Wrocław. His main research interests concern steppe nomads in the political and cultural landscape of medieval Europe, and relations between the Byzantine Empire and "northern and Scythian barbarians" between the 10th and 13th centuries. His main publications are Pechenegs. Nomads in the Political and Cultural Landscape of Medieval Europe, Boston–Leiden 2015; and Konstantyn Porfirogeneta, O zarządzaniu cesarstwem, ed. and trans. A. Paroń, Wrocław–Warszawa 2024.
	Dr Carina Damm Assistant professor and postdoctoral researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She obtained her MA in History and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Göttingen and her PhD from Leipzig University with a thesis on Scandinavian–Slavic interrelations in the Viking Age. Before joining IH PAN, she was a postdoctoral researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Nordic and Old English Studies (CBNS), University of Silesia, where she led a project on environmental extremes in the medieval North. Her research focuses on the environmental history of Northern Europe and, most recently, on Viking Age Brittany.
	Dr Arkadiusz Siwko A graduate of history within the Interfaculty Individual Studies in the Humanities programme at the Jagiellonian University, where he obtained a master's degree with distinction in 2020. In April 2025, he obtained his PhD at the University of Opole with a dissertation entitled The Borderlands ('Borders') of Rus' from the 10th to the end of the 13th century: narrative strategies, socio-political functions, terminology (defended with distinction), under the supervision of Professors Adrian Jusupović and Marcin Böhm. Since October 2025, he has been working as an adjunct at the Department of Source Criticism and Editing at the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on Old Rusian source studies, the problem of borderlands in the Middle Ages, and the administrative systems of the Rurikids' domains.
	Dr Angus Russel Research fellow at King's College, Cambridge, where he works as part of the college's Silk Roads Programme. His research focuses on the history of Mongol and post-Mongol Eurasia, with a particular focus on the politics, institutions, and culture of medieval Rus and Muscovy. His PhD thesis concerned the evolution of fiscal models in the regions conquered by the Mongol khans.
	Michał Gawęda, MA Interested in the history of law, particularly in the relationship between law and criminal procedure, as well as in comparative law. In 2023, he received his bachelor's degree with distinction from the College of Interdisciplinary Individual Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw. In 2025, he graduated with distinction in history from the University of Warsaw, defending a thesis on the origins of the Sejm court, and in the same year received a law degree with distinction from the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Warsaw. Since 2025, as a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw's Interdisciplinary Doctoral School, he has been working towards a doctoral dissertation on the history of the Sejm court in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

More information

• Database introduction — how the Database works, how to search, entry structure
• Database — browse and search entries