presence of mind and the future of legal history Even if we do think about everything I have just described, andmore, how much will we get ‘right’? Will future legal historians look back on us as psychic prognosticators and prophets, or gullible gamblers and guessers? To start with, we might need to ask about how much are legal historians flowing in the contemporary tide of sociopolitical thought just as much as any other type of legal actor? When legal historians to come examine our work, what will they see us caught up in, and will they conclude that we knew we were caught up, or will they see ignorance in our ink? As we look back on the recent history of legal academics, there are significant movements of intellectual thought we can put a label on, such as the legal realists in America and Scandinavia, or the critical legal-studies movement, and, perhaps most recently, the attempt to reformulate much legal work in terms of Human Rights. Just as ‘modern art’ was cutting edge once, but now seems not, what language should we use to describe the trends in legal historical thought we have now? Legal history might be called the study of how and why a given legal event in the past happened. That event might be defined broadly to take into account a century of history, or narrowly to encompass the goingson in a judge’s mind before putting judicial pen to paper. Either way, it is the study of the causation in historically and legally relevant events. More powerful legal history tends to draw these events together in some fashion, analysing or explaining how they lock together into a progression or can be viewed from above to form a larger picture. Indeed, if I were to be so bold as to make a claim about what legal history is, I would probably say it is about explanation. About explaining how and why the forces affecting the law had the effect they did, and lawyers’ understandings of them – the effects of ideas on decisions, and the effects of decisions on the wider world.This is the work which is the most difficult and yet so rewarding. It requires understanding how legal actors reasoned, and then showing how that reasoning translated into effects on law and on society. It has to deal not just with law, but politics, sociology, phi51 What do we think legal historians in the future will think of legal historians today?
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