would like tothank my friend Kjell Modéer for the opportunity to congratulate Lund University on its anniversary by joining in the comparison and assessment of different perspectives on legal history and historical knowledge advocated over the past fifty years. My choice of topic was inspired by an essay by Matt Dyson in which he reflects on the intimate connection between legal history and comparative law: both disciplines, as he puts it, attempt to explain the law without being limited by one view of it.1 F.W. Maitland famously stated that ‘History involves comparison’, and comparison, to paraphrase Goethe and Thomas Mann, is a necessary prerequisite for understanding one’s own identity.2 This applies to people as much as to legal rules and legal systems. Inmy ownwork I have attempted to discover what has shaped our modern rules of private law in Europe and the legal systems influenced by European law (particularly in the fields of obligations and succession), and how the rules in the modern legal systems relate to one another. I part v • comparative legal history 1 ‘If the Present were the Past’, American Journal of Legal History 56 (2016), 41–52. 2 ‘Why the History of English Law is not Written’, inH. A. L. Fisher (ed.), The Collected Papers of Frederic WilliamMaitland(Cambridge: CUP, 1911), i. 488; Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, v: Josef und seine Brüder (Frankfurt amMain: Fischer, 1974), 1139: ‘Denn nur durch Vergleichung unterscheidet man sich und erfährt was man ist, um ganz zu werden, der man sein soll’; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, Act V Scene 5: ‘Vergleiche dich! Erkenne, was du bist!’ 232 Understanding the law in a historical and comparative perspective 14. Reinhard Zimmermann
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