presence of mind and the future of legal history fewer requirements to travel and go to where documents are held might also mean fewer chances to discuss the material with local specialists and networking opportunities. We might also wonder whether the common law tradition of single author projects, or occasionally, writing partners, will survive the need to produce work of greater scope more quickly. The model of teams or newly reconfigured but still coherent departments, such as in the Netherlands, might provide fruitful research and funding opportunities. The source materials might be solid for events before the1950s, but we have a very different problem for the more recent past. There has been an explosion of materials. Of the many complex reasons for the unravelling of the ius commune, one was that it was very hard to maintain unity of reasoning and content when much local legal writing gets published and spread. Now that most legal systems have online reporting of almost all their cases, and journals are multiplying online, even breeding with less formal sources like blogs, there is a significantly vaster collection of legally relevant material for research than there used to be. Many of these might be hard to find today, but it is very hard to predict how permanent they will be for the future or indeed, what new mechanisms will be created by then. Just ten or twenty years ago one might use a newspaper article to cite a politician’s explanation of a measure in a national Parliament, such as inThe Times, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, or Süddeutsche Zeitung. Some historical titles have now failied, likeArbetet, while other are online only, likePost-och Inrikes Tidningar. But now you are more likely to find the modern media quoting and linking to a twitter feed, rather than a statement in the legislature or an interview with a journalist. Legal historians are not immune to the pressure on all academics to publish more. Our research output has grown, although perhaps not at the same rate as its originality. As a rule, shorter-term projects get funded, they get published, and they get their authors promoted more easily. Longer-term projects and significant individual works are rightly valued in theory, but in practice they are harder and harder to make space for in a career. Will this destructive spiral outwards be narrowed in future? 49
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