legal history•introduction • kjell å modéer My own scholarly focus in this period was the history of the legal profession, and Robert W. Gordon at Stanford was an inspiring discussion partner.23 He was very influential in the critical legal studies movement and introduced me to a new cognitive world.24 Also at Stanford, Lawrence Friedman was a fascinating discussion partner. His concept of legal culture had spread to legal historians in the seventies, not only in theUS but also in Europe.25 He inspired for example Boel Flodgren, later Professor of Business Law at Lund, when she spent a year at Stanford.26 In the late 1980s he visited Lund on a couple of occasions, and I spent some time as a visiting scholar at Stanford and Berkeley, included in their vital and inspiring research environments. He received an honorary degree from Lund in 1993. Swedish legal culture was specifically mentioned in the statutes of the Olin Foundation as one of its aims. The Foundation duly financed a project on Swedish judicial culture, as demonstrated in the country’s courthouses, initiated in around 2000. Its findings are available at the Swedish National Heritage Board website.27 Essentially a documentation project, it also resulted in the 2011 thesis by Eva Löfgren at the Department of Conservation,Gothenburg University, on the perception of rural public space, use, and meanings in the past, using Swedish courthouses from 1734–1970 as examples.28 Meetings of Nordic legal historians hadbegun already in1983 in Turku. Our host, Lars Björne, has for decades been an important colleague within the Nordic community of scholars. He spent a year in Germany on a 23 Richard Abel, Lawyers in Society: Comparative Theories (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); John P. Heinz & Edward O. Laumann, Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar (Russell Sage Foundation; Chicago: American Bar Foundation, 1982). 24 Robert W. Gordon, ‘Critical Legal Histories’, Stanford Law Review36 (1984), 57–125. 25 Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘On Legal Development’, Rutgers Law Review24 (1969), 11; id., ‘Legal Culture and Social Development’, Law & Society Review4/1 (1969), 29. 26 Kjell Å. Modéer, Rättshistoria som samhällets spegel: Om Lawrence M. Friedman och hans vetenskapssyn’, in Eva Lindell-Frantz et al. (eds.), Festskrift till Boel Flodgren(Lund: Juristförlaget, 2011), 252 ff. 27 www.raa.se/in-english/digital-services/about-bebr/. 28 Eva Löfgren, Rummet och Rätten: Tingshus som föreställning, byggnad och rum i användning 1734–1970 (Rättshistoriskt bibliotek, 67; Stockholm: Rönnells, 2011). 30
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=