are filled with temporality. Temporality is simply an ontological precondition for law’s existence, an obvious observation which should really be given more attention. One could even toy with the idea of every law faculty having a legal temporalist to remind us of the importance of temporality in law and legal research. The profession of legal history – to which I belong – has historically been occupied with interpreting legal pasts of different kinds. That is an important task. But temporality is about the interconnections between past, present, and future. Legal language is filled with temporal words. Contract law deals with forming, performances, and endings; legal titles are prescribed; all welfare rights are governed by deadlines of all kinds: there are thousands of other examples. All this is self-evident. Law exists and functions within time frames and time limits. The temporal dimension of law exists in the three fundamental modes of past, present, and future. However, the most important mode is the present. It seems clear that any presupposition about the past or the future will always be that of the present. The pret seemsto me the moment has come to talk about the dimension of time in legal science and law.1 All activities in law and legal research I part vii • legal history and legal science 320 1 This essay is based on a paper given at The Future of Legal Scholarship through the Lens of the Present and the Past: The Lund Faculty of Law 350th Anniversary Symposium, 7 December 2017. The temporalities of law 19. Dag Michalsen
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