nized a workshop on how to teach comparative legal history.5 Several participants became founding members of what is now the flourishing European Society for Comparative Legal History which holds biannual international conferences. In 2003 James Q Whitman, professor of legal history at Yale Law School, critically observed “the neo-romantic turn” within comparative law.6 Some of the comparatists he referred to, e.g. Pierre Legrand and Vivianne Curran, belong to the interesting innovators in this field. Whitman argued that for this new generation of comparatists, differences rather than similarities occupied scholarly attention. The new discourses regardingidentity, cultureandtraditions brought differences into focus in comparative legal history.7 Each period of time within the law is related to the legal past. We can identify history not only as the obsolete past but also as the living past. Legal history, though, is in my view not only defined as antiquated legal rules and norms, but is about history as a model of explanation to understand our present legal system. With such a view history is important not only for the interpretation of the valid contemporary law. History is defined as a part of the living past. I have used the metaphorof the Living Ruinas an example:8 In 2024, we observed the semiquincentennial celebration of the birth of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In Germany there have been three great exhibitions on his works during this year in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. In the early 20th century Friedrich was regarded as an almost forgotten artist. The cultural discourses those days were concentrated on modernity and modernism. Today, however, Friedrich has been elevated to an icon within German romantic painting. Iremember the Friedrich-exhibition fifty years ago in 1974 inKunsthalle in Hamburg. 122 renaissance for legal history The longue durée of legal historical argumentation 5 Kjell Å Modéer & Per Nilsén (eds.) How to teach comparative legal history, Lund 2011. 6 James Q Whitman, “The neo-Romantic turn”, in Pierre Legrand & Roderick Munday (eds.), Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions, Cambridge 2003. 7 Kjell Å Modéer, Abandoning the Nationalist Framework, Comparative Legal History, OUP. 8 Kjell Å Modéer, “Living ruins of the law on legal change and legal history”, Scandinavian Studies in Law, 2008;”Lebende Ruinen des Rechts: rechtliche Metaphern in postkolonialen und spätmodernen Rechtskulturdiskursen”, Rechtsgechischte 2011.
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