The archive becomes a device for immanent critique: it reveals how legal knowledge stabilizes itself, how certain distinctions become authoritative, and how political tensions are absorbed and naturalized within legal discourse. Johansen makes this ambition explicit,45 but it is also present in Nääv’s genealogy of equality. In both cases, the archive operates not as a neutral repository but as a method for unsettling law from within its own materials and categories. Seen in this light, the constructed archive does not yield a stable account of what law “is.” Rather, it demonstrates that every legal reconstruction, including their own, is situated, contingent, and shaped by methodological choices. The archive therefore functions simultaneously as an acceptance of legal positivity and a critique of its epistemic boundaries. It highlights the temporal nature of law’s authority, its dependence on curated pasts, and the persuasive work required to make those pasts appear coherent. If so, then constructing an archive is itself a legal act: a legal submission, an intervention, a way of redescribing the past to make the present intelligible. And perhaps this is precisely the point. The archive, far from fixing law’s meaning, exposes its historicity, its partiality, and its vulnerability to reinterpretation. 118 constructing the past: legal archives and critique 45 Johansen, Förvaltning som verksamhet: bidrag till offentligrättens allmänna läror (above, note 10), p. 99 ff.
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