It is widely acknowledged that 19th and 20th century Belgium is characterized by vast industrialization, enhancing cultural and technical developments. Essential to these advancements, and central in its realization and continuation, the building sector is challenged to adjust. Since the organization of the Belgian building sector was infamously informal, it is hard to determine to what extent professions were delineated and how responsibilities were distributed – especially at a time when legal title protections were not yet in force. To approach this obscurity, this research approaches the construction sector through a legal lens by looking at formal court settlements between building actors regarding supervision and negligence crimes, in order to make professional relations and normative practice explicit. The tension between the 'rules of the trade' and 'the word of the law' will be scrutinized through the examination of expertise in construction litigation and the identification of the construction expert.

To analyze conflict between professional building partners, this research suggests and argues that it is essential to scrutinize criminal court records. Accordingly, this investigation mainly focuses on building accidents that occurred through a lack of supervision, resulting in involuntary injuries or even death. The focus on construction site accidents allows us to engage with richly bundled court files within Belgian State Archives, Belgian jurisprudence, and legal doctrine works that are preserved in specialized libraries.

To challenge the anecdotal essence of these cases, and to address the often-overrated convenience of interrogation files as to ‘give a voice to the otherwise voiceless in history’, this investigation will be done through critical discourse analysis. Here, textual examination – or the analyses of used argumentative tropes – of interrogations and expert reports will be nuanced with intertextual (e.g. verbal references to legal texts) and contextual data. Ultimately it becomes possible to make a comparative analysis through space (local differences) and time (before, during, and after legal embeddedness and certain socio-economical events).

In doing so, this research aims to shed light on the historical construction sector through contextual legal history research by unveiling the distribution of responsibilities, and thus: normative practice on the construction site.