authors chose to remain within what could be called the juridical domain. As I have indicated in this article, the archival method – based on description – that Johansen and Nääv deploy brings several rewards. Chief among them is that it offers a powerful way of studyinghowlegal change takes place from within law, through shifts in legal concepts, discursive formations, and doctrinal sedimentation. However, this method – and the question of how it operates – also carries a potential cost. That cost is not a defect but a structural limitation of the approach, one that invites further reflection on the political dimensions of legal scholarship. One limitation relates to a fundamental question in intellectual history: What is the role of ideas in legal change? Are legal concepts mere reflections of deeper social and material transformations, or do they possess some autonomous force, shaping, limiting, or enabling political and institutional change in their own right? Neither Johansen nor Nääv directly addresses this question. Their archives demonstrate that change happens inlaw, but they do not offer as much insight intowhy such change occurs, or what external forces – economic, ideological, or institutional – might have driven it, although Nääv does point to a broader ideological climate within the group that drafts the preparatory works.38 Both focus on reconstructing how certain concepts changed (or did not change), but not the broader conditions under which that change became necessary or intelligible. There is nothing wrong with a commitment to understanding law as a site of discursive struggle – a discursive struggle all the way down – but it may lead to an inability to explain why certain legal ideas emerge and succeed while others fade. Now, as I said, this is not a flaw as neither Johansen nor Nääv took it upon themselves to answer such questions. Indeed, by highlighting how different groups have chosen to interpret the law, one reveals their preferences. This is the strength of description, as Anne Orford argued, as it can make visible what we already see. But it reflects a potential limitation. 115 petter danckwardt 38 Nääv, (O)likabehandling. Likabehandling och jämlikhetsförbättrande åtgärder i den svenska diskrimineringslagstiftningens genealogi (above, note 10), p. 276 ff.
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