part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen sent has numerous views on the past and the future, whether as utopias or dystopias. As lawyers well know, any legal interpretation uses past legal texts to solve the question at hand and to regulate the future. Whatever age of the legal sources or whatever inherent values there are in the actual law, the needs of the present and the future will govern lawyers’ opinions. Thus, the past for lawyers is instrumental in character, and ought to be so, because their task is to regulate the present and the future. Still, obvious as these observations are, they are not as clear-cut as they may seem. They must be taken in context, often of temporal character. The temporality of legal language means it is not enough to say that lawyers’ temporal modes are the present and the future: the same goes for the vast number of legal concepts passed down to us, each with its long genealogy, and each governing legal interpretations and understandings to a considerable degree. I would also like to highlight what I would call the meta-histories of law which we all are part of. The grand theories of the legal past and the potential future, like that of the teleology of, say, natural law, democracy, the welfare state, or the rule of law, are expressions of liberal ideologies of law that have formed our perceptions of law to a degree of self-evidence. On the other hand there are many more authoritarian ideologies that both historically and at present structure lawyers and the law. My point here is that we must remember the historical ideological narratives of the lawyer’s work, the societal forces that over time structure the law, and the way we understand them all. The autonomy of the law is never immune to these forces. Moving from these abstractions, we find immediately encounter the discipline of legal history as one important way to understand and interpret the connections of law and time. I would argue that the discipline of legal history today has an obligation as the guardian of the understanding of the temporalization of law and legal science. Legal history is both an interpreter of the temporal categories in the activity of legal science and an arbiter between legal science on the one hand and the social sci322 Legal history and legal science
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