part vii • legal history and legal science • lena foljanty adays. Thus Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde stresses the role of communication in creating and shaping legal culture. Reinhard Zimmermann’s priority is a comparative approach to legal history, shared by Heikki Pihlajamäki, who even argues that ‘comparison is legal history’, and who argues that comparative legal history so understood would have to be sensible of its contexts, not bound by national borders and entities, and not confined to the study of texts, all while analysing its practices. Michael Stolleis, like Serge Dauchy, accentuates the importance of exploring the links between private law and public law, and engaging in research that reflects the history of law beyond the borders of these two legal fields. The sheer diversity of approaches to the past, present, and future of legal history is evident from the present volume. What is remarkable is that this diversity is not felt to be contradictory, as is often the case, but rather as different elements in a bigger picture. The image that comes to mind is a carpet, which while it has patches of different colour and sometimes different textures is nevertheless one carpet. We could say that the authors of this volume have woven this carpet together. Certainly, years of friendship and scholarly discussion have been conducive to openmindedness on the part of all the contributors. The volume shows that a willingness to engage with other perspectives and be inspired by them is worth cultivating. This for me is one of the goals for the future of legal history. Even though my task is to revisit the contributions to this volume, Kjell Åke Modéer has asked me to include my own approach to legal history. As we can never escape our own perspective, the combination of the two tasks is meaningful, creating not only transparency about my views, but fitting well with the plural but interconnected approach to legal history found in this volume. In recent years legal history underwent a huge change. It went global. The research focus shifted from regional, national, or European settings to the entanglements between Europe and the world. The circulation of 356 The Baltic region and the global turn
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