Legal history has in recent times not only embraced law’s relation to time and history but also time and space. Jewish immigrants from Germany in the 1930s introduced comparative law in theUS.AfterWWII theinternationalizationof law increasingly has been an important reason for the change. To a great extent the law has gone global; I will return to that. Comparative legal history has been introduced as a new discipline, today perhaps the most apparent change within legal scholarship. In the post-World War II United States, German Jewish law professors especially brought this change. Forced to transition from a civil law system into a common law system, they became famous comparative lawyers. The German Jewish comparatist Max Rheinstein(1899– 1977) exemplifies this transition. When he moved from a chair in comparative law in Berlin to one in Chicago he had to change legal paradigms in his mind, from civil law to common law, or as Rheinstein formulated it: he had to try to forget that he had ever studied law. From an international and traditional perspective, legal history also has taken a fascinating turn, starting with the French Annales School and its structural concept of longue duree, analyzing the long perspective back to the laws of the antiquity. Since the 1990s, the evaluation of the near past has also been an increasing field of interest, contributing to the “turn to history”. James Q Whitman, professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, and also a skilled legal historian, has focused on this “neo-Romantic Turn” to history and romanticism within the law in a 2002 article.9 He has observed that an increasing number of legal scholars has “been working to breathe new life into the grand tradition of Romanticism, insisting on the importance of cultural ‘difference’ in the diverse legal systems of the human world and resisting anything that smacks of a belief in some single ‘natural law’. Comparative law had in the post-WWII period been dominated by a ‘functional’ ap124 renaissance for legal history 9 James Q Whitman, “The neo-Romantic Turn”, in Pierre Legrand & Roderick Munday (eds.), Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions, Cambridge 2003. Comparative legal history Longue durée and originalism in the law
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=