next layer representingnational legal culture and the third layer below, the dwells, representing the transnational deep structures of law. This construct involved the discourses regarding culture, tradition and legal values. Traditionally dissertations in legal history dealt with themes within roman law or medieval law. My dissertation in 1975 dealt with early modern law. Fifteen years later Juristische Zeitgeschichte or contemporary legal history opened up for new fields of research. In Germany the director of Max Planck Institute for European Legal HistoryMichael Stolleis (1941–2021) developed the field of contemporary legal history, Juristische Zeitgeschichte,13 dealing first of all research related to the unlawof the 20th century.14 This discourse resulted in 1993 in a chair of contemporary legal history and civil law at The University of Frankfurt am Main (held by professor Joachim Rückert). Michael Stolleis belonged to the first post-war generation of jurists with no personal experiences of the unlaw of the Hitler regime. His generation came to the universities in the late 1960s and they started to put blunt questions to the elderly generation of professors: What did you do during those years to stop the dictator? At the West-German Universities open lectures were held, so called Ringvorlesungen, where the law professors were called to the pulpits by the students to tell what they had done to uphold the rule of law during this period. It was, however, not until the German law students had grown up twenty years later (in the so calledHistoriker-Streit) as the German jurists seriously attempted to reach a mature reconciliation with the past. Nearly every legal historian in Western Germany paid attention to this discourse, contributing with articles, books and lectures to the process.15 Stolleis’ book on this topic was translated into English.16 The discipline contemporary legal history remains very active in Germany 126 renaissance for legal history Contemporary legal history: A part of the turn 13 Michael Stolleis (ed.), Juristische Zeitgeschichte – ein neues Fach?, Baden-Baden 1993. 14 Michael Stolleis, Nahes Unrecht, fernes Recht. Zur juristischen Zeitgeschichte im 20. Jahrhundert, Göttingen 2014. 15 Kjell Å Modéer, ”Det tredje riket inför rättshistorien: en litteraturöversikt”, Svensk Juristtidning 1996. 16 Michael Stolleis, The Law under the Swastika: Studies on Legal History in Nazi Germany,Chicago 1997.
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