legal history•introduction • matthew dyson colleagues, and funders that all areas of legal study necessarily involve legal history. Legal historians would benefit from refining how to ‘package’ their subject, without either dumbing down and losing its intellectual purity, or imagining that everyone will see its inherent value without a good introduction. This may become a question of whether the wider values of learning, research, and culture that legal history represents should be on a pedestal next to the economic value of a degree. This applies even, or particularly, to law.Yet the message that history (including legal history) is the best teacher of life is hardly a new one, and one that legal historians, as teachers, colleagues, and researchers, can still be making.8 It is also a point which may need to be made in different ways as time passes. Each year legal historians are being provided with the opportunity to flex the very muscles which they think they are helping students to build. We might also wonder about to whom legal historians address their work. Many legal history journals are not referenced or even glanced at by academics, practitioners, and judges. That may be perfectly sensible, since the target audience may be specialists in one field or time period. Yet legal historians must ensure that enough scholarship reaches a wider audience to show the depth and value of the historical perspective, or, at thevery least,which works to look for and where. In some legal cultures, and Sweden might well be one of these, legal history is valued and appreciated. In others, it might be seen as impractical. It is interesting that for common lawyers, where the power has traditionally resided in the courts and practitioners, legal history has been valued because of the common law’s inherent historical bent through precedent and tradition. But it faces competition in the academic world, particularly in funding and the interest of the coming generation, from other disciplines, whether they have the lure of private earnings (commercial or company law) or they are seen as more collaborative and/or challenging (critical legal studies, law and economics, and law and psychology). I have seen feedbackon a paper submitted to a leading generalist law journal in England 8 Cf. the related but slightly different use history through a lens: Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1942), bk ii, ch. 9, 36. 46
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