dish parliament on abolishing the professorship in legal history at Lund university. As a legal historian working in this pragmatic context I found my inspiration abroad. In Germany the biannual meetings for Germanspeaking legal historians, Deutsche Rechtshistorikertag, became an important place where you could be informed regarding the current research. I developed a fruitful network of German colleagues early on, and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History founded in Frankfurt 1964 became a central institution for us young legal historians. In 1984–85 Ispent an academic year together with my family in the United States, at the University of Virginia School of Law in Charlottesville. That year totally changed my perspectives on legal scholarship and legal history. Not only did I meet interdisciplinary research, but also a very hospitable, open-minded and generous faculty, working within a legal system characterized by a vibrant discourse on the rule of law, the constitution, the judiciary, judicial review, the legal profession, and legal history. Critical legal studies (CLS) was at its peak that year. The landmark issue inStanford Law Review1984 regarding CLSand legal history still represents the pinnacle of an important period inUSlegal history.3 Many great legal historians in theUSat that time were “crits”. When the period of CLSwas over in the late 1980s the concluding expression became: “In a way we are all crits now”. Not necessarily with a left-wing perspective, but with a sceptic view to the realists and the pragmatists. They consciously regarded the necessity for a legal scholar to have a theoretical and methodological standpoint. In my opinion this more theoretical approach to the law characterized the legal discourses of the two last decades before the millennium shift. In this article I will try to demonstrate this development. Since the 1990s we have observed interesting and important discourses related to the combination of time and space in legal history and comparative law, comparative legal history.4 At Lund in 2002, we orga121 renaissance for legal history 3 Stanford Law Reviewvol. 36, 1984. 4 Kjell Å Modéer, ”Ömsesidiga parasiter? Om relationen mellan rättshistoria och rättssociologi”, Festskrift till Håkan Hydén, Lund 2018. The neo-romantic turn in comparative law
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