long interpreted legal history with these dominant legal tools, whether their formation, their character, and their shifting functions in history, globally and locally. However, to understand the modern exigencies of considering legal tools which have been around for centuries, I will take a detour through the methodological relationship between legal science and legal history. Structurally, the discipline of legal history has two parts to play in legal science.7 The first is temporalization; the second concerns the borders of knowledge between legal science on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. Neither is exclusive to legal history, but it is in the nature of things for interdisciplinarity to be part of the functional identity of legal history. Legal history interprets past and present temporalizations in law and legal science. Lawis temporality. Lawunfolds itself over time, and by that has numerous levels of time functions. To reflect on law’s temporal dimension is a central task for a legal historian. In many ways history is not something past – the past is always the past of the present, and thus entails to us the potential of future law.8 The lawyer analyses and integrates the levels of time in law as an actuality, while the legal historian’s contribution is to understand it as a historical panorama. What I would call the sensitivity of time in law falls to the legal historian. Perhaps the legal historian should in fact be called a legal temporalist, as the key disciplinary category is in truth temporality, and not just history. But, as always, labels are unimportant. Besides this task, the discipline of legal history may contribute to interpreting the borders of knowledge between legal sciences on the one constitutions and codifications, 1667–2017 7 Markus D. Dubber & Christopher Tomlins (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford: OUP, 2018); Anthony Musson & Chantal Stebbings (eds.), Making legal history: Approaches and Methodologies (Cambridge: CUP, 2012); Dag Michalsen (ed.), Reading Past Legal Texts (Oslo: Unipax, 2008). 8 See further Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time tr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 331 Legal history and legal science
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