hat each of uscan say from our perspective is nothing about ourselves.Our own self is the one we know the least, even though W we spend our entire lives in our own company. We will never fully know what others think of us and our doings. And what we think of ourselves varies, as is well known, according to the time of the day, the season, the ambiance, our general happiness, and self-doubt. It cannot be written about, not for public consumption at least. But that said, I do enjoy writing about the development of social law, contemporary legal history, and the intellectual history of public law – in that order and in relation to Germany – from the perspective of an observer. Social law first. In Germany, we have been using the portmanteau term‘social law’ for a good sixty years. It can mean any number of things. It can mean traditional welfare for the poor (which today is called social assistance), help for war victims, the statutory workers’ insurance against disease, accidents, and old age (introduced by Bismarck in 1883–9), and ultimately all laws of the interventional state characterized by a social purpose, whether assistance for people with disabilities, children and adolescents, the homeless, young people in training, victims of crime, and so on. That they constitute their own area of social law is due to the politics and economics of the early Federal Republic. Since 1949 there has been, part iii • contemporary legal history 158 Social law, contemporary legal history, and the history of public law 9. Michael Stolleis
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