part ii • legal cultures • kjell å modéer been much less concerned with high constitutional decisions than with what was actually happening to ordinary people. When I say ordinary people I mean not necessarily poor people. I mean also a shopkeeper, or a local banker, a local owner of a dry goods store, or even a local owner of an undertaking parlour. These are the people who use law; they may not even know they are using it, but they do use the law. So that’s why I have been interested in what Europeans call private law, family law, and so on. And if you asked what are the most important legal developments in the nineteenth century, I would mention other things. Not to say that Supreme Court decisions are not important, but even more important were such things as development of the collusive divorce, or legal techniques for buying goods on the instalment plan. These were vital. Each particular case or court suit or contract or incident is insignificant in itself, but in the aggregate, they are enormously important. Legal history, other than Hurst, had largely ignored these developments. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Lawyers are important. We have many lawyers. They are an important group. People sometimes say that I exaggerate the fact that law is a dependent variable; lawyers mould the law and make a difference. And in a way they do. But I think if you focus too much on the lawyers you miss a large part of the picture. Still, I probably would not have made that remark today. Not potentially, but actually. I remember I once went to a conference in London, and at that conference – I’m not sure I remember it correctly, but they had a panel on family law. There were present, among others, 112 In the mid-1980s, when you were at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, you came up to Lund and talked about legal cultures, and I remember I asked you about the role of the lawyers and you gave a very blunt answer, that you were not interested in lawyers. But it was a pedagogical statement, because I understood your intention with your concept of legal culture. You also told me once that you looked on European legal history traditionally as a boring subject.
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