material to this archive, Orford could shift her focus from being a study of the concept itself (and what she refers to as the deadlocks of positivist and critical legal approaches) to being directed towards the specific practices conceptualized as reflective of the legal concept of R2P. Both Otter Johansen and Nääv adopt this method and thus contribute to a continuation of sorts of the work initiated by Orford. In this way, I argue, they can be said to produce archives as heuristic devices to enable a critical, genealogical inquiry into legal concepts, not seeking to determine their “true” meaning, but rather to understand how particular legal understandings and structures have emerged historically. In so doing, they avoid treating law either as a closed system of norms or merely as an ideological mask. Neither Otter Johansen nor Nääv use their archives to settle doctrinal disputes, but to uncover the historical and discursive conditions under which certain legal categories came to dominate their respective fields and materials. Johansen focuses on the conceptual ordering of Swedish public law and administrative practice, and the subsequent development of a “blind spot” concerning concrete administrative practices. Nääv focuses on how legislative practices constructed a bias toward formal non-discrimination.In both cases, the archive functions as a selected and organized body of texts, a curated material that allows them to produce more historically sensitive descriptions of law. Now, in each work, the metaphor of “the archive” functions to explain how a certain material is assembled and approached. Here, the word archive is used heuristically to motivate and justify specific methodological decisions. The archive is, in this sense, a selected collection of texts, assembled and read through a theoretical lens. However, the concept of an archive in its more traditional sense, as a dormant, unstructured accumulation of historical documents, remains in the background. The “archive” here is not a passive, dormant site of knowledge; it is an active construction, agenealogical device for understanding law’s entanglement with its past. Although both make use of constructed archives, they direct their inquiries differently: Johansen uses the archive to rethink core concepts of administrative law from within the legal tradition in order to push for a potentially more critical and “eclectic study of the state,”26 while Nääv uses hers to expose how po110 constructing the past: legal archives and critique 26 Johansen, Förvaltning som verksamhet: bidrag till offentligrättens allmänna läror(above, note 10), p. 286: “This present local investigation of certain administrative-law concepts
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