why legal history matters way. Coupling legal history with the state had a long pedigree, as it had begun in the tsarist period. Roman private law was also taught at Tartu throughout the Soviet era, and became a way discretely teaching the students something of how the free world operated. This was important: even in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union, academics tend find and create spaces in which they can express themselves with some degree of freedom. Traditional, technical Roman law in many ways resembled positive law in its ultra-formalist, Soviet style, and neither seemed dangerous to the Soviet state. In practice, as the Estonian legal historian Marju Luts says, Roman law and legal history could help create spaces of at least some kind of academic freedom. In totalitarian states, legal history is thus often severely marginalized or placed in the service of the official state ideology. Legal sociology, even more dangerous, rarely figures on the curricula of law faculties in totalitarian states. However, as Csaba Varga, Peter Solomon, and others have shown, legal sociology did emerge as a distinct discipline in the Soviet Union and some of its satellite states, starting in the 1960s, although the sociologists’ research results were often classified and not revealed to the public. The poor state of legal history during the communist period still reflects on the way legal history is practised in Russia. The path dependence is apparent. Despite modern legal history featuring as a research area at some of the best Russian universities in recent decades (such as the Higher School of Economics in St Petersburg and Moscow), the best way of gaining a reliable picture of Russian or Soviet legal history is by reading research produced in the West, typically at the topUSuniversities, by either Westerners or emigrated Russians. Much the same applies for China. Despite the emergence of Chinese universities, law faculties included, at the top of the university rankings, the best historians of Chinese law work in universities outside the PRC. Can legal history be dangerous in countries not described as totalitarian, but instead as showing signs of giving up the basic principles of liberal Rechtsstaat? Often, this would be an exaggeration. In Turkey, for instance, professional historians have not been persecuted because of what they have produced academically, but rather for their political ac351
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