part vii • legal history and legal science • heikki pihlajamäki tions. According to Professor Edhem Eldem of Istanbul’s Boğaziči University, what professional historians write is not interesting per se, as long as their work does not segue into public political opinions. However, sometimes measures can toughen up. In Russia, the government removed the accreditation of the European University in St Petersburg in 2016 (subsequently returned in 2018), and similarly the licence of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences in 2018. Both universities are high-quality teaching and research institutions in social and human sciences, and they have a reputation for fostering critical thinking. The problems that the Central European University in Budapest has faced are well known. Not our problem? True, not really, or at least not yet. But what happens in countries where democratic values are threatened should remind us of the important goals that social and human sciences serve in liberal democracies, and what purposes legal history serve in legal studies. Why is legal history important? There are many reasons, the most obvious being that legal history transmits cultural traditions and ways of thinking, thus participating in legal identity-forming of both law students and the public; legal history helps law students and the public locate their legal order in time and place; and legal history answers important questions, such as where do we come from, where are we, who are we. Legal history is not only about positioning law and jurists in time and place. Law, in modern societies even more than before, is about translating political power into social reality. Therefore, and even more than other branches of historical research, legal history is always political and of potential interest to power holders and demagogues. As the masters of archives, libraries, and therefore facts, legal historians are responsible for upholding defensible scholarly interpretations of the facts even when under attack. I say ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ on purpose, because – unlike the formidable postmodern strand of history and legal history – I do not think that historical interpretations or law are all about politics or style, that one interpretation is as good as another, or that history is just another form of storytelling. I am afraid that in this era of ‘post-factualism’ we are reaping the whirlwind of that way of doing history. 352
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