Education and Research in Roman La\x- and Legae History 275 problem. Within the law faculties, legal history has to prove its social relevance and even economic utility daily. This is not easy, all the more since the same criteria and standards of evaluation are used as for the other disciplines of the sciences, even of the positive sciences. To illustrate this, one can point at the fact that the same quotation system for publications on the basis of which credits are attributed is used for legal historians as it is for civil engineers, irrelevant though this systemmay have proven for the first category. A second problem is inherent to the dual character of the discipline itself. Roman lawand legal history are a cheval between the mere humanities and the social disciplines. Jurists often consider legal history to be a mere historical discipline, whereas historians consider it to be a mere juridical discipline. When applying for credits or a research mandate, the risk of being sent from one funding committee to another has proved to be realistic all too often. The problemis not only serious on the structural and financial level, but also on the intellectual level. Legal historians often give in and reduce their discipline to a mere legal and non-historical approach or to a mere historical approach without any reference to the juridical contents of the sources they study. Both approaches are of course fruitless and strike at the very heart of the relevance of legal historical research and education. This situation is partly brought about and anyhow strengthened by the fact that education and research in Roman law and legal historv are almost exclusively concentrated within the faculties of law. There is very littleattention devoted to these subjects in the departments of history. It is amazing how few historians have any interest in legal history. Some years ago, professor Van Caenegemorganised a colloquium devoted to this problem. It is illustrative for the situation that verv few historians attended and that most legal historians affirmed their splendid isolation theories in their communications. In consequence, the historical dimension of legal history is getting suppressed. More and more, history is interpreted as the transformation of older juridical systerns into the actual ones. The teleological approach is becoming dominant. This inevitably leads to a kind of neo-pandestic approach and destroys the historical character of the disciplines. It leads to an assessment of the past without any reference to the social context. The urge of many jurists within the lawfaculties to reduce Roman law and legal history to a legitimising footnote in any juridical monography or article is considerable. Afootnote the legal historians must only provide when requested. Furthermore, Roman law and legal history as cultural, historical disciplines are part of the study of the history of civilisations and social dynamics. If Max Weber or Norbert Elias had held more of a grasp of legal history, their theses on the capitalismand on the development of civilisation would have been different.
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