sense, and as I will argue below, law can be understood as a hegemonic technique in the Gramscian sense: it operates by selecting, formalizing, and naturalizing interpretations of the past, thereby producing a version of common sense. Time, then, is not just a medium in which law operates – over time, law as a language contributes to organizing and mobilizing, and in turn to legitimizing authority. The legal historian’s task is to reconstruct the past in a way that helps make sense of the legal present. For the legal-genetic historian, this means tracing how legal systems came to take the form they did and how those forms can be critiqued or developed further. But if history is always already part of legal reasoning, then treating legal history as a separate field risks obscuring this deep temporal entanglement. This is not an argument against legal history, but a question of why history is often seen by lawyers as external to their work. Now, I believe there are reasons for this, and for why legal history is a field of its own. The works by Croon and Koskenniemi are historical not only in subject matter but in showing how law itself is shaped by its historical self-understanding. Where the lawyer’s concern is often to bracket the past in support of present claims, the legal historian asks how those brackets were drawn in the first place. For the “practicing lawyer,” the past is useful insofar as it can be stabilized and made authoritative; its messy contingencies must be pared away so that a coherent argument can be presented. The “historian,” by contrast, treats those very contingencies as evidence, tracing how particular doctrinal lines came to be privileged, forgotten, or reinterpreted. The difference seemingly lies not only in the chosen methods but in the kind of knowledge each seeks – law as persuasion, or law as historical emergence. The question is worth raising because recent developments in Swedish legal research suggest, in a new way, that the past is an integral part of legal work itself, not as something external to it. The two rather recent Swedish law dissertations mentioned above by Tormod Otter Johansen and Maria Nääv respectively, employ Anne Orford’s method of description and of constructing an “archive” to reframe the relationship between the past and present in legal practice. As Otter Johansen 107 petter danckwardt New Swedish approaches to the past in law? Constructing “the archive”
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