law, time, and place: a lund perspective on legal history The first PhD student to finish a thesis on legal history at Lund under the new university law of 1977 was Christian Häthén, who defended his thesis on penal legal history in 1990.21 His international contacts were withtheMaxPlanck Institute in Frankfurt and, later, Freiburg. Since the 1980s he has been a respected and appreciated lecturer in legal history at Lund. Sweden’s second post-war generation of legal scholars had the unique possibility to spend a year at American law schools with support from the American Society of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Program. Several of the young Lund faculty took the opportunity. Alexander Peczenik spent a year at Cornell, Lotta Westerhäll Gisselson at Yale, and I spent an academic year at the University of Virginia, taking in lectures at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Stanford University, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley and Los Angeles. Reinhold Fahlbeck, professor of labour law and international relations, also spent time in US, and for some years was affiliated with Stanford Law School.22 Our generation was introduced to a quite different scholarly openness towards the concept of legal scholarship Sweden’s post-war legal community was still monolithic about textual analysis and the legislative sources, and concepts such as human rights, justice, and customary law were still considered peripheral. American legal and interdisciplinary scholarship showed us that there was another side to the coin. 20 Bernhard Diestelkamp, Rechtsfälle aus dem alten Reich: Denkwürdige Prozesse vor dem Reichskammergericht (Munich: Beck, 1995); id., Das Reichskammergericht amEnde des alten Reiches und sein Fortwirken Im 19. Jahrhundert (Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 41; Cologne: Böhlau, 2002); id., Vom einstufigen Gericht zur obersten Rechtsmittelinstanz: Die deutsche Königsgerichtsbarkeit und die Verdichtung der Reichsverfassung im Spätmittelalter (Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im Alten Reich, 64; Cologne: Böhlau, 2013). 21 Christian Häthén,Straffrättsvetenskap och kriminalpolitik: De europeiska straffteorierna och deras betydelse för svensk strafflagstiftning 1906–1931:Tre studier (Lund University Press; Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1990). 22 Reinhold Fahlbeck, Industrial Relations i USA: Ett porträtt av‘The Land of the Free’ (Lund: Juristförlaget, 1988). Fahlbeck’s international experiences also include Japan, id., Två möten i samurajernas stad: Bilder från Japan(Visby: Vitterlekarna, 2004). 29
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=