Twining-Llewellyn archives

The Twining–Llewellyn collection is a unique body of several hundred documents and books assembled by William Twining throughout his career. It is housed at the Perelman Centre.

William Twining

A professor of law, William Twining taught in Africa, England and the United States. He is Emeritus Professor at University College London. Associated with the socio-legal movement, his research includes legal theory, particularly the question of context (Law in Context) and the relationship between globalisation and law (Globalisation and Legal Theory; Globalisation and Legal Scholarship). Together with Benoît Frydman, William Twining co-supervised the doctoral thesis of David Restrepo Amariles. In this context, he proposed that the Perelman Centre house his personal archives, so that they could be preserved and made available for future research projects.

A substantial portion of these documents concerns the American jurist Karl N. Llewellyn, to whom William Twining devoted a biography (Karl Llewellyn and the Realist Movement, 1973).

Karl N. Llewellyn

Karl N. Llewellyn (1893–1962), a professor at Columbia and, from 1951, at the University of Chicago Law School, is regarded as one of the leading figures of the American realist school. His reputation rests in part on one of his best-known articles, “Some Realism about Realism”, published in the Harvard Law Review in 1931. His realist outlook led him to collaborate with an anthropologist on a study of the Cheyenne legal system (The Cheyenne Way, 1941). In the United States, he is also remembered for his decisive role in drafting the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC).

The archival documents held in Brussels, some of them originals and many annotated in Twining’s own hand, date from the 1910s to the 1960s and cover the various aspects of Llewellyn’s academic life. They include most of his publications, transcripts of several dozen unpublished works and some of his lecture notes. Researchers will also find personal and professional correspondence, as well as dozens of documents relating to his research and the drafting of the UCC.

In October 2025, the Karl Llewellyn archives were opened to the public and are available for consultation by interested researchers.

The complete catalogue of the Llewellyn archives is available here.

A guide to the collection and the sections of the catalogue is available in French; an English version is forthcoming. The catalogue and guide were prepared by Yannick Ganne, an associate member of the Perelman Centre.

The archives relating to William Twining’s other work are not yet open to the public.

For further information, please contact the Centre at centreperelman@ulb.be.