litical struggles over equality were juridified and transformed through legislative drafting. In both cases, the archive becomes a lens for making visible the conditions of legal knowledge. What becomes visible through the work of Orford, Otter Johansen, and Nääv is that interpretation, the articulation of what counts as relevant research questions, and the delineation of relevant materials do not merely draw from an archive but actively produce it. These acts of selection, framing, and relational ordering push both the research problem and the research process forward. In doing so, they bring the very archive they work with into being. “The archive” is therefore not a pre-given repository waiting to be accessed, but the outcome of methodological and interpretive decisions that shape what appears, what is excluded, and what relations are rendered thinkable. Rather than understanding the archive in a traditional sense, the “archive” in this legal-analytical context is produced through interpretation and understanding. The point here is to emphasize that neither the “archive” nor the material it contains appears or speaks for itself, a position advanced in archival studies.27 Indeed, as Norwood Hanson argued, observation is theory-laden: observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven, and historical and contemporary understanding are similarly entangled.28 Thus, the metaphor of the “archive” arguably describes the process of gathering, assembling, interpreting and understanding a certain material. In other words, the ways in which the material is gathered, assembled, interpreted, and understood is neither a deductive nor inductive study of a passive, dormant body of resources but acreative and interpretative process. Using an archive in this sense has much in common with so-called abductive approaches which proceeds from empirical 111 petter danckwardt within the field of public law is one among many possible ways of approaching the question of what the state is […] the potential for a restored eclectic discipline that we may call the study of the state [statslära].” My translation. 27 John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory,Ashgate 2009, p. 129 & 151–53. 28 Norwood Russell Hanson, Patterns of Discovery. An Inquiry into the Foundations of Science, Cambridge 1958. The implications of constructing archives
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