presence of mind and the future of legal history to do so, or as legal historians to ourselves teach more such courses. Even if such approaches were to succeed, law teachers are still confronted with students baffled by the historical treatment of topics and asking themselves ‘how will this help me in the exam’. Legal historians would need topersuade students,who almost universally want courses condensed or truncated in the face of law’s growing complexity and the growing competition between students and other disciplines (whose graduates might later convert to law). The success of inserting legal history into practicebased qualifications, which the English legal professions feels intense pressure to accept, or as a legal executive seems even less likely, as the model for those qualifications is focused on modern legal problems faced in practice. The alternative approach is to accept that legal history is a specialist topic, and to work to ensure enough students take it to justify the lectureships that support the research. The same need to show its worth will apply, just without the breadcrumbs left by ensuring it features in other subjects. The ultimate fear is that legal history will be pushed out of ‘practical’ law schools entirely, perhaps into history faculties, if they will have it. In either case, the number of undergraduates who study legal history will also have a direct effect on the pool of research students and future lecturers in legal history. The availability of funding for graduate programmes, not to mention jobs in legal history, is already difficult. Any new or mid-career university lecturer in legal history must have other strings to his or her bow, most obviously by teaching the modern forms of the historical issues studied, like modern land law for a historian of land law. Perhaps a deeper lesson from Hamson’s approach is to ask how legal historians candemonstrate the value of a historical awareness, regardless of the facet of law. Legal historians may need to find better ways to communicate the subject’s ability to draw out the ideas underlying the decisions which led to the current law, and how those ideas affect us now. This process might then build a body of examples of how legal and nonlegal thought has led to legal change, which could be called upon by lawyers working today. It would then be easier to sell the idea to students, 45
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