presence of mind and the future of legal history the Bernhard Diestelkamp, the Lawrence Friedman, the Michael Stolleis, the Pia Letto-Vanamo, the Dag Michalson of the future? What of the university and legal history? I am personally well aware of the efforts many have made to find the talented legal historians of the future, to nurture them and train them. But even that courageous effort requires a system of education which exposes students to legal history in the first place, and provides employment and other opportunities for historical research. Are there the jobs available? Will there be in the future? And how will university funding work? Will a subject that does not easily point to direct, quantifiable – for which read financial – benefits be able to assert its importance in future? In his 1955 inaugural lecture as Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Cambridge, Jack Hamson argued that the survival of legal history, and by implication comparative law, depended on it being thought part of every substantive area of law, rather than only as a separate discipline.3 Facing a decline in the subject’s appeal, this approach sought to protect its long-term future by ensuring that all students studied some of its content and reasoning. A similar challenge was recently noted by a report from the German Council of Science and Humanities: The outcome of the report was a series of proposals to change legal education. For instance, it called on law faculties to increase interdisciplinarity and become more international in their legal scholarship (includ3 Charles J. Hamson, The Law: Its Study and Comparison(Cambridge:CUP, 1955), esp. 18–19. At the time Hamson published his lecture, the Faculty of Law was experimenting by not offering a specific, dedicated course in legal history (ibid. 18). 4 Wissenschaftsrat, Prospects of Legal Scholarship in Germany: Current Situation, Analyses, Recommendations (2012), 13, www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/2558–12_engl.pdf, accessed 8 Dec. 2015. 43 the future success of the discipline [law] will depend on its ability to recognise and explore important structural changes of the law in time. These developments – the juridification [sic] of societal processes (Verrechtlichung), the emergence of alternative processes of law and norm creation which give rise to new forms of law and ways of enforcing the law on the national and international level, and the Europeanisation and internationalisation of law –must be studied and taught systematically and with regard to their practical effects.4
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