Even if Robert Gordon applied his model on the historical argumentation of theUSConstitution and its dependence on history it can be applied on other phenomena in legal history. His research on the history of the US legal profession has been extensive and inspiring. Some years ago he published abook, Taming the Past: Law in History and History in Law(essays on legal history and the uses of history in legal argument), which very much is related to the discourse on the turn to history within law.33 Legal internationalism and globalization have, of course, also contributed to the historical turn, especially in the post-colonial discourse. In a great article, “Three globalizations of law and legal thought: 1850–2000”, Duncan Kennedy at Harvard Law School has, from an American perspective, constructed a global legal history of the near past by observing three paradigms within legal scholarship, the classical, the social and the human rights.34 The first paradigm of globalization, the classical, is that of the dominant classical roman law within legal thought and the upcoming progressive era after the civil war from 1870 up to the outbreak of the Great war in 1914. The second paradigm, the social, was introduced around the turn of the twentieth century and runs up to around the civil-rights movement 1968. The third paradigm of legal globalization, characterized by human rights, started with the end of theWWII in 1945 and continued up to the beginning of the new millennium, when Kennedy published his paper. For him the concept of change is concentrated to the overlapping periods 1900–1914 and 1945–1968. The first dynamic period created legal modernity and modernism within art, music etc. – along with global colonialism. The second postwar-period reconstructed with the help of human and civil rights a new decolonization of empires. Are there new constructs in the new millennium which indicate a turn to history within legal scholarship? My answer is yes, and it can be related to the post-modernity, which opened up for traditions and 133 kjell å modéer Post-colonialism and global legal history 33 Robert W. Gordon, Taming the Past: Law in History and History in Law, Cambridge 2017. 34 Duncan Kennedy, “Three globalizations of law and legal thought: 1850–2000”, in David M. Trubek & Alvaro Santos (eds.), The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal, Cambridge 2007.
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