social law, contemporary legal history, and the history of public law become far more ‘Western’, more open, as a result. As a more tolerant society it gained inner stability: the lesson of parliamentary democracy was learnt, and it stayed stable and resisted right-wing and left-wing temptations. An effective economy and a strong system of social protection have supported that, as has several generations of study abroad in other democracies, especially the US. Legal history and my second subject, public law, have kept pace with these movements and followed their themes and questions. German public law is now governed by the constitution and its interpretation by the constitutional court in Karlsruhe. European law and the fight over the refashioning of the European constitution opened the way to new dimensions. What used to be nationally orientated constitutional history has adopted comparative European perspectives.Now there is even widespread interest in the history of international law (Martti Koskenniemi, David Kingsbury, Randall Lesaffer, Yasuaki Onuma, Masaharu Yanagihara, Miloš Vec, and others). This is not a coincidence; it is the result of global political changes since 1989. With more to it than a new ‘history of private law after Wieacker’ (Hans-Peter Haferkamp, Joachim Rückert, Ville Erkkilä), contemporary legal history has won the recognition as a new subject. However, these days the legal history of the Middle Ages is not dominated by legal historians, but by mediaevalist historians. Further, Scandinavian legal history as written by German authors (the likes of Karl von Amira, Konrad Maurer, Heinrich Brunner, or Claudius von Schwerin) no longer exists, unfortunately. Partly this was because it was contaminated by Germanophile enthusiasm and Nazism. It also lost many of its areas of research due to source criticism (Karl Kroeschell). I would like to end on a personal note. I am ever grateful that I met Sten Gagnér on an autumn day in Munich in 1965. Through him and my observations of him I learnt what legal history can be. His manner, his scholarly personality, his ‘studies in the history of ideas of the legislation’, his many seminars, mainly about methodological questions: all this made an impression. For me, encountering Sten was, like for many others, a stroke of luck. He made me understand Sweden as a whole and 165
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