Legal History, the Common La>ä- and “Englishness” come something of a transnational movement. In England, this renaissance has been underpinned by recent changes in legal education including the attenuation (albeit partially) of the legal professions control over legal education, the expansion, pluralisation and increasingly inter-disciplinary character of university legal education and scholarship, the rise of postgraduate studies and the research degree as an increasingly important pathway to an academic career in law. This has been fortified by the “legal turn” within history writing: of increasing numbers of historians undertaking research on aspects of the history of law and society, mastering the law and takingseriously its intellectual structures in much larger numbers than hitherto. While some of this work is parochial, it is also the case that an increasing body of work consciously seeks to transcend the artificial confines of national histories by investigating, for example, the inter-face between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and the construction of Britain; the European dimension in English and Continental legal history; and the construction and development of the Anglo-Atlantic Community and the British Empire. It is perhaps no accident that this work is being undertaken at a time when both within and without the United Kingdom, identity in all its manifold guises (racial, ethnic, gender, class, family, regional and national), national sovereignty, and the nation state have become increasingly problematised by factors such as the rise of multinational corporations, multinational and multidisciplinary lawfirms, the revolution in “information technology”, the European Union and allied transnational structures of governance, “multiculturalism” and inevitably, “globalisation”. Today, there is an increasing awareness of the fact that each individual has a set of multiple identities that operate at different times and under different circumstances. Indeed, “identity” and “community” have moved centre-stage in the political and intellectual debates of the final decade of the millenniumas powerful localising and globalising pressures reconfigure law and society. An increasing though partial parallelismis evident as between the Common law and Civil lawtraditions. Indeed, the “distinctiveness” of national legal traditions, “thinking like a lawyer” and the efficacy of a legal canon have all become more problematic. Much more could be said of the newlegal history: but that must wait for another occasion. My own hope is that the new legal history, and gatherings like ours today, will foster a larger view of legal history and its transnational dimensions, one characterised by vision and cosmopolitanism. 225
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