legal history•introduction • kjell å modéer 22 4 Bäärnhielm 2002, 5 ff. 5 Henrik Munktell, Det svenska rättsarvet (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1944). 6 Regina Ogorek, ‘Rechtsgeschichte in der Bundesrepublik (1945–1990)’, in Dieter Simon (ed.), Rechtswissenschaft in der Bonner Republik: Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Jurisprudenz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), 16 ff. 7 Franz Wieacker, Privatrechtsgeschichte der Neuzeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der deutschen Entwicklung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1952). 8 Guido Kisch, ‘The Study of Legal History in Europe and America Past and Present’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis(1951), 1–24; Kjell Å. Modéer, Det förpliktande minnet: Juridiska fakulteten i Lund 1666–2016(Stockholm: Santérus Förlag, 2017), 320 ff. The founder of the Olin Foundation, Gustav Olin, an alumnus of our faculty and an appellate judge in Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm, took note of Sjögren’s aims, and wrote in his deed of donation in 1947 that he wanted to guarantee support for national research about Swedish legal history in an unsecure future. The main task would be the huge project of writing Sweden’s legal history. Seventy years after the establishment of the Olin Foundation such a project has not yet been initiated.4 During the Second World War most jurists in neutral Sweden took a nationalist, patriotic view of Swedish law. It became a part of their national identity. In 1944 the professor of legal history at Uppsala, Henrik Munktell, a politician and a Conservative Member of Parliament, published a fervent plea for the recognition on Sweden’s legal heritage and its importance, Det svenska rättsarvet, which for some years was the standard textbook in legal history at Swedish law faculties.5 However, postwar continental Europe took another direction, as circumstances demanded that legal historians make a fresh start. In 1947Heinrich Mitteis, one of the most important German legal historians of the twentieth century, published his magisterial account of the rebirth of legal history, Vom Lebenswert der Rechtsgeschichte, and in the same year the professor of legal history inTübingen, Paul Koschaker, published his post-war classic, Europa und das römische Recht.6 Togetherwith FranzWieacker, Mitteis and Koschaker found a wide readership in Sweden.7 In 1949 the Jewish German legal historian, Guido Kisch, who in the 1930s had emigrated to the US,was invited to pay a return visit to Lund. He came and gave a lecture on the position of legal history in Europe and the US, and referred to his contemporaries, Mitteis and Koschaker.8
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