presence of mind and the future of legal history more than many other areas of legal study, legal historians do, but typically only in one sense. Many legal historians dedicate vast amounts of time to indexing, cataloguing, editing, and generally preserving earlier sources for current and future research. Classic examples include significant work by David Seipp on the Year Books, Robert Palmer’s AngloAmerican Legal Tradition resources, based at the University of Houston and now with over 6 million images of English legal records from 1217– 1800, and many excellent works by Sir John Baker and Paul Brand. A poignant recent example is the Lokin et al. edition of Theophilus’ Paraphrasis, published in 2010.2 The work of tracking down all the possible fragments of this important Greek lecture course on the Institutes of Justinian took almost the whole of Professor Lokin’s working life, as he foresaw in his inaugural lecture and acknowledged on his retirement 32 years on. The English translation relied on had never before been published, but had taken Alexander Falconer Murison almost the same time and effort while an academic at University College London, almost a century earlier. The work comes without notes or commentary, just texts and a translation. Beyond such cataloguing, preserving, and making accessible, do legal historians spend enough time considering the whole tapestry of what is needed? Do we plan what work we would like done? And what are the units of our perception of legal historical work to be done? Do we see research in terms of books, or articles, or large-scale projects? Are we thinking big enough? Are we envisaging larger challenges or collections of books, conceived twenty years before completion and involving multiple authors?We can reduce it to a personal level too.Do we think about what we will each be doing in 10, 20 or 30 years? Can we foresee what we can do? We can foresee learning a new language, or gathering new material, or perhaps learning a new methodology like statistical analysis, but can we see or imagine the new layers of understanding we will have? Even if we cannot foresee them, will we notice them when we stumble over 2 Johannes H. A. Lokin, Roos Meijering, Bernard H. Stolte & Nicolas van der Wal (eds.), Theophili Antecessoris Paraphrasis Institutionum, tr. Alexander Murison (Groningen: Chimaira, 2010). 41
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