part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen for legal science in toto. No one can claim—as some did some twenty or fifty years ago – that there is one single norm for doing ‘proper’ legal science. Perhaps we should talk about legal history in the plural, as legal histories, just as we refer to the legal sciences, as this signifies the many combinations of disciplines that such a practice involves. Thus to talk of ‘a method of legal history’ is out of the question in today’s global and fragmented world of research. All the models, angles, and methodological tools with which the many legal pasts both are and ought to be studied automatically exclude any abstract notion of a discipline and a set of common methods. Admittedly, this at once private and democratically defined past-making will always be countered by several factors, such as the need for communication and the presence of institutional frameworks. But regardless, we still have to recognize that the conditions of research have altered in recent decades. Greater freedom is being gained. This brings us to the theme of the temporalities of constitutions. I have touched on the general history of constitutions; I could equally well have written about the history of the concept of constitutions, or the many temporal mechanisms within the constitutions themselves, most famously about the variety of rules for the amending of constitutions. A little bit of everything is called for, but I would like to highlight the importance of the constitutional text itself and its ability to create specific temporalities. The well-known tension between text as static entity and its evolving interpretative history calls for reflections on exactly how time is involved. Thus I will analyse the historical anatomy of the modern constitution that came into being around 1800 and, implicitly, its temporality. First, though, some narratives. One of the central qualities of the modern constitutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – and here I am thinking of 1776, 1787, 1791, 1809, and 1814 – was their specific, innovative textuality. In contrast to constitutions of the preceding era, or the English situation, where the constitution as a concept did not require one written 324 The temporalities of constitutions
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