The light was low, but sufficient for reading.That was helpful, since there were many, many books to read. It seemed a constant in life, the man thought to himself, that there was always another book to buy and never enough shelf space or memory on his computer. But read them he must, if he was to complete the footnotes for the publishable form of his speech, given at the Sällskapet Lundajurister event to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Lund University in 1666. Maddalan Maaria af Igelkott’s lecture, a foray into his recent masterpiece, Portuguese Irregular Laws, was a chance to set out his theories of legal development to a new generation of law alumni from Lund. The most difficult thing to get across was quite why some lawyers in the past had found particular issues worth such extensive treatment. The argument that the ius commune still underpinned Portuguese law in the second half of the twenty-first century needed serious support. Similarly, it was hard to explain why some otherwise incredibly capable scholars had focused so much on succession in the early part of the century. Perhaps his biggest challenge was to work out what the lawyers of the past had been thinking fifty years ago. Our fictional professor poses an interesting problem.1 What will the passage of time show about our work as legal historians today? There is, perhaps, no better place to think about it than when reflecting on the legal history•introduction 1 I am very grateful to Kjell Å. Modéer for the invitation to ask provocative questions about the future of legal history. This essay builds on an earlier paper for the relaunch of a lead38 Presence of mind and the future of legal history 2. Matthew Dyson
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