legal history•introduction • matthew dyson work of distinguished colleagues. We might consider two perspectives. What do we, the legal historians of today, think the legal historians of the future will be doing? Put another way, if the future were the present, what would we be doing? What do we think the legal historians of the future will think of what we are doing now? Put another way, if the present were the past, what would we be thinking about it? What should we be doing the legal history of, in what ways, and about what countries, so it has meaning not just now but into the future? Who will be the legal historians of the future, and where will we find them working? (And how can we protect the place of legal history in the education of lawyers and law students?) How will legal history be done? We might start in the here and now. Legal historians today take on research projects for a mixture of reasons. Once we start in an area, we tend to continue in that field for some time, utilizing the more closely related interests, knowledge, and skills we possess. Thus, for many of us, our first inspirations as students have continued with us, broadly or even narrowly. But we still make selections, from wider or narrower fields of choice. We do so for many reasons, such as intellectual interest, source material availability, novelty, importance and opportunities to strengthen existing contacts or develop new ones. Sometimes we decide the direction more than in others, such as when we are asked to contribute to another’s project. Sometimes we say, more often about others’ work, particularly when reviewing it for funding or a publisher, that a specific piece of research needs to be published, that it needs to be put out into the academic and wider community. But do we think enough about what the discipline more generally needs? Do we plan our work according to what needs to be done for future legal historical work? In fact, perhaps ing legal history journal, ‘If the present were the past’, American Journal of Legal History (2016), 41–52. Particular thanks to Oliver Dyson for the image of Prof. af Igelkott. 40 What do we think legal historians will be doing in the future?
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