legal history•introduction • matthew dyson losophy, economics, technology, and personal idiosyncrasies. It involves understanding the mutual adjustment of a legal system to its environment in society. It has to address methods of legal change, from path dependency to systems theory, and, at its heart, how variety is introduced, selected, and retained, in the face of the extreme complexity of thousands, millions, and billions of lives. One particular aspect of legal work Hamson himself said has great potential is comparative law. As F. W. Maitland once wrote: Stefan Vogenauer has argued that comparative law in its modern form is a relative newcomer, as it used to be a variant of legal history: Comparative law, according to Vogenauer, was only ‘emancipated’ at the turn of the twentieth century. I would argue there is a good case to be made for future legal historians to be situated in a discourse rich with comparative law, a return if not to ‘universal jurisprudence’ then to properly reasoned and contextualized jurisprudence. Doing so would allow for a real understanding of whatever is being studied, not one misled by misunderstandings with forebears, relatives, or neighbours.12 10 F. W. Maitland, Collected papers (Cambridge:CUP, 1911), 488. 11 Stefan Vogenauer, ‘Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtsvergleichung um 1900: Die Geschichte einer anderen “Emanzipation durch Auseinanderdenken”’, Rabels Zeitschrift für ausländisches & internationales Privatrecht 76/4 (2012), 1122–1154. 12 Michele Graziadei, ‘Comparative Law, Legal History, and the Holistic Approach to Legal Cultures’, Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht 552 (1999), 533–7; Mathias Reimann, ‘Rechtsvergleichung und Rechtsgeschichte im Dialog’, Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht (1999), 496. 52 History involves comparison and the English lawyer who knew nothing and cared nothing for any system but his own hardly came in sight of the idea of legal history.10 The idea of a ‘universal jurisprudence’ required a multi-dimensional comparison of the laws of all countries at all times in order to infer general laws of legal development. Later, the notion of comparative law also comprised the study of contemporary foreign laws with a view to domestic law reform or legal unification. It was only around the turn of the century that the latter conception of comparative lawprevailed and the close link with legal history was broken.11
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