ed into two categories. The second consists of the rest. For quite a long time I thought it was a joke. Then I studied law and discovered there was one important group of humanity, namely lawyers, and out there were the rest, the so-called ‘non-lawyers’. This is an interesting issue since it is not often you hear about ‘non-dentists’, ‘non-engineers’, ‘non-preschool teachers’, ‘non-tax assessors’, ‘non-computer technicians’. The talk of non-lawyers is a good example of ‘we and they’ thinking. There are parallels, of course. The Catholic Church teaches that ordinary people need priests to make the right contact with God. Likewise, lawyers must be esoteric: they have seen the light, and can show the rest of humanity the way to the real law, to salvation. Perhaps, though, the question is whether humanity would be better divided into legal historians and ‘non-legal historians’. The drawback to that are the further subdivisions between different schools of legal history. It is true that some are rather small, with only one member – shades of the political movements in Life of Brian. Although perhaps you have not seen it, because you do not find that sort of thing funny, or you are too young or because it was censored in your home country, as it was in Ireland and Norway (in Sweden the posters read ‘So funny it was banned in Norway’). sa child iwas told that humanity can be divided into two categories. The first consists of those who believe that humanity can be divid- A part iii • contemporary legal history 177 11. A short comment on the history of administrative law and Michael Stolleis Mats Kumlien
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