part vii • legal history and legal science • dag michalsen 330 It is not enough to be a law faculty with a venerable history, though. Indeed, an old faculty stuck in its ways cannot respond adequately to the rapidly changing systems of law, whether research or education. And there are several significant issues that all law faculties must address. Should legal education build on a general law education, or should courses be specialized by legal task? Then there are the inherent tensions between a legal education built upon disciplinarity and a legal education built upon interdisciplinarity – an enduring problem without obvious answers. To what extent should the internationalism of contemporary law be reflected in predominantly national legal education? And most of all, how can law faculties convey to the legal and political systems that there is insufficient capacity for high-quality research in a world of juridification and conflictual internationalism? These considerations are to some extent reflections on the spirit of the age, as John Stuart Mill once called the shifting interconnectedness of time and society.6 As a legal historian, my task is to interpret the interplay of time, legal institutions, and law, and in my opinion a necessary step in understanding the history of law faculties and their past activities is to consider their current state. The tensions between internationalism and nationalism, between research and professional education, between the study of law as a science or as jurisprudence: all the contemporary issues have historical parallels. To connect these contemporary interests with certain historical reflections, I concentrate here on long-term temporal perspectives on constitutions and codifications. The time span has chosen itself – 1667–2017, befitting the 350th anniversary of the Lund faculty – but it is far more than a passing courtesy on my part. For Samuel Pufendorf was one of the originators of both the constitutions and codifications of my title. All lawyers know the importance of these two legal structural tools in society, and that alone should justify important portions of the international curriculum today. Both constitutions and codifications shape our debates about law, politics, and social development. Legal historians have 6 John Stuart Mill, Spirit of the Age (1831), inThe CollectedWorks of John Stuart Mill, ed. Ann P. Robson & John M. Robson, xxii (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=