The topic of the conference “A Turn to History in Legal Scholarship?”, addresses a highly relevant and important topic for all scholars who have been occupied with legal scholarship in modernity. As a legal scholar who has experienced a positive paradigm shift in this regard, my professional career – beginning in the late 1960s – has been dedicated to incorporating historical perspectives into legal scholarship. §The following essay draws substantially on my autobiography – my story – chronicling my experiences with history and historical argumentation from the post-war period up to contemporary times.1 I was appointed professor of legal history at the Lund University Faculty of Law in 1978. It was in the middle of the cold war, but also in the final stages of the creation of the Swedish welfare-state. At that time, I experienced a very poor intellectual scholarly environment related to legal scholarship and particularly to legal history. The legal historians had to defend their positions in relation to my colleagues in positive law. The political preparatory works to the new statutes in the Swedish welfare-state were created for the future and regarded as the dominant legal source – and the pragmatic Swedish dissertations in law were more or less written as handbooks for the judiciary. From the mid-19th century and up to World War II the legal historians were regarded as important members of the law faculty. Every statutory reform included a historical introduction. It was a part of the legal evolution from the historical past to the modern future.2 The post-war period, however, witnessed a significant decline for Swedish legal history. In the mid-1970s there was a discussion within the Swe120 kjell å modéer Renaissance for Legal History. A Neo-romantic Turn to History in Legal Scholarship? Prologue 1 Kjell Å Modéer,”Signifikanta biomständigheter:Reflektioner efter tjugofem år som professor i rättshistoria”. Från Schlyters lustgård: Rättshistoriska uppsatser, Lund 2004. 2 Kjell Å Modéer, Juristernas nära förflutna, Stockholm 2009.
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