tion-state building, the future of legal history was imagined to be national.1 In the post-war years, keenly aware of the atrocities of the war, legal historians envisioned the future of their discipline to be European.2 The present in which legal historians lived encouraged them to address certain questions to the past. The respective present shaped the questions as well as the approach to and understanding of history. As in all historical research, legal historical research mirrors the challenges of the time in which it is conducted. Our vision of the past and our understanding of the present are the grounds on which we envision the future, with past and present the ‘two currents to the future’. The contributors to this volume were asked to consider the past and present of legal history through the lens of their own research; however, our visions for the future inevitably crept in. It uch hasbeen written on the future of legal history. Depending on the context and period, the answers differ. In the period of na- M part vii • legal history and legal science 1 Joachim Rückert, ‘The Invention of National Legal History’, in Heikki Pihlajamäki et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History (Oxford:OUP, 2018), 22–83; id., ‘Die Erfindung nationaler Rechtsgeschichten in Europa’, Rechtsgeschichte 26 (2018), 22–69. 2 See, for example, Paul Koschaker, Europa und das römische Recht (Munich: Beck, 1966); Helmut Coing, Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neueren europäischen Privatrechtsgeschichte, i (Munich: Beck, 1973). For the ideological grounds of European legal history, see also Thomas Duve, ‘Von der europäischen Rechtsgeschichte zu einer Rechtsgeschichte Europas in globalhistorischer Perspektive’, Rechtsgeschichte 20 (2012), 18 ff. 354 Concluding remarks: Looking back to the future of legal history 22. Lena Foljanty
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