law émigré max rheinstein (1899–1977) Professor Helmut Coing(1912–2000), a friend of his at the Frankfurt law faculty, said that US research on comparative law was dependent on the interaction with legal history and the sociology of law. That was natural in a legal culture dependent on the opinions of the judges. In continental Europe it had been important for research to turn to the judicial law of the Supreme Courts and the legal profession. Judicial culture and historical perspectives would have to be important fields in legal science in future.53 Coing was a legal historian and Rheinstein a legal comparatist, but both operated within the same legal paradigm and zeitgeist. In the post-war period, modern encyclopaedias (handbooks) were important to further research in private law, and both men were extremely active in the field, Coing with the Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte (1973–1988), Rheinstein with theInternational Encyclopedia of Comparative Law(1974).New modern encyclopaedias were published, and extensive transnational networks were an essential factor in their preparation. By 1970 new cognitive structures were appearing. Postmodernity and postcolonialismbrought fresh perspectives to legal science; legal harmonization and universalist perspectives increasingly competed with critical discourses and concepts such as legal differences.As a consequence the concepts of legal culture and identity were introduced, and was a new, more diverse family law.54 Rheinstein prepared not only for a future for Germany and Europe but also for universalist values and perspectives, which with help of comparative law he tried to find in family law. Universalism’s deep structures of the law became important parameters in his research, while his new identity in Chicago gave him an outsider’s perspective – and as an American citizen – working for German democracy, but also to identify and analyse the universality of the law within comparative legal research. Legal historical research in Europe has today caught up with Rheinstein’s 53 UChicago, SCRC,Max Rheinstein Papers, Mary Ann Glendon toMR, 7Oct. 1975, Helmut Coing ‘outline of the topic to be discussed in one of the sessions of theDGVgl’, ‘Einleitung in das Thema’. 54 Interview with Lawrence Friedman in this volume, 118. 273
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