the temporalities of law ences and humanities on the other. The legal historian is thus occupied with the shifting borders of time and the borders of disciplines within the legal science in the broadest possible understanding of that word. To achieve this it is important not to define legal history in the world of legal science too narrowly – it must be open to the variety of tasks and the problems of legal science of today. Thus, I maintain that it would be difficult and, crucially, of no value to operate with one common method for a unified discipline of legal history. As the link between history, the social sciences, and legal science, legal historians ought to reflect upon the character of the disciplines. Where would that leave a model of legal history? The epistemological pressures on the discipline of history in recent decades have been very rewarding. The result has been several interesting methodological programmes, radically historicizing our conceptions of the past and making it far harder to uphold unreflective certaintist or essentialist positions. Although sharing a healthy scepticism about the possibility of knowing ‘the reality of the legal past’, and accepting the necessary philosophical questions, I equally have to accept as a practitioner of legal history the existence of such a past reality, or rather past realities. This soon transforms itself into a question of the relationship between the represented past and the present historical representation. There is no one-to-one relationship between a historical legal source (text) and a past legal reality. What we have to do is to discuss pragmatically how best to organize our legal historical representations and their vocabulary, classes, and relations within the framework of the historical and legal methods for reading historical sources. On the whole I would advocate a plurality of methods, in the sense that the common territories of law and history are structured in a heterogeneous manner, and the world of research is so manifold that not to state the model of plurality of methods is simply useless. This will also leave things open to the varying time dimensions in law. To sum up, the field of legal history does not mean reflecting on a coherent discipline of law, but on a field of research that involves different subject matter, which depends on the individual voice of the researcher and the questions posed. This is not only the case for legal history but 323
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