concluding remarks: looking back to the future of legal history is needless to go back to Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) or Reinhard Koselleck’s Vergangene Zukunft (1989) in order to demonstrate how interconnected the three tenses are in which we live, think, and write. Like the conference from which it grew, this volume brings together colleagues from all the Nordic countries and several other European countries, and from different generations, who have developed their research agenda in different presents. The plurality and resilience of the discipline is evident. Kjell Åke Modéer, Bernhard Diestelkamp, and Michael Stolleis show the historicity of their own research agenda by spelling out the contexts in which they developed their fields of study. The flourishing post-war research on the German Reichskammergericht, we learn from Diestelkamp, was carried by the interest in a counter-model to the centralized state, which had lost its legitimacy during the Second World War. The growing interest in German legal history in the Nordic countries is emphasized by Kjell Åke Modéer as an important context for his research on early modern courts in the German territories. The huge gap left by traditional constitutional history is the point where Michael Stolleis picks up inWissenschaftsgeschichte des Öffentlichen Rechts. He uses his experience of creating the new subdiscipline of contemporary legal history to point out that drawing attention to existing lacunae can be highly political. When legal historians first started to conduct research on the Nazi past in the 1960s and 1970s, they faced considerable resistance. Other contributors are concerned not with the history of historiography, but rather with present approaches and the nature of legal history in future. The need to engage in law in action is emphasized by Serge Dauchy and Nina-Louisa Lorenz for the courts’ practice as a field of study. Sören Koch takes the same line on the compiling, editing, and reading of legal literature as a practice, while applying socio-legal methodology in a field studied so far mainly as a part of intellectual history. Lawrence Friedman’s pioneering work on legal culture is discussed as the foundations of what is broadly acknowledged in socio-legal history now355 Plural approaches, plural connections
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