On Law and History beyond Historicism

Is legal history history as the historian understands it?

Interlacements

It is a trivial truth that legal history is not economic history or art history.

For ontological historicism, however, there is an immediate problem: what criterion would permit the distinction of these several domains of investigation? Whatever way you look at it, the criterion itself can never be just historical. Without a concept of law, one cannot practice legal history. Although that concept, in its subjective theoretical character, will have a history of its own, nevertheless as law concept it inevitably tries to grasp in theory the constant modal structure which guarantees the juridical character of legal phenomena.

Anyone who thinks that the legal historian has constantly to adapt his concept of law to the different popular opinions about law, which arise in the various periods he studies, has not yet understood much of the problem we are examining. In the first place, the concept of law is an articulated scientific…

View original post 151 more words