history within the positivistic and realistic perspectives of the postwar period. When Ronald Dworkin in 1977 published his Taking rights seriously he confirmed the human and civil rights revolution, which since then again has established the human rights as a part of legal scholarship. An example of this tendency is the reconstruction of theMPIofLegal History in Frankfurt, which since some years have been renamedMPI for Legal History and Legal Theory. Today the institute has three directors. During the directorship of Thomas Duve andStefan Vogenauer the focus lies on the transnational approach to European Legal History by pursuing research in the fields of Global History and Comparative Law. With the appointment of the new third director Marietta Auer in 2020 the institute has dedicated a third department to legal theory and thus expanded its field of research. The MPI now takes a global view of legal history and legal theory and avoids the Eurocentric approach the institute initially had from the 1960s. A particular challenge embraced by the institute is to create historical and empirical bases for a critical study of the system of law in a globalized world. To this end, the institute is paying increasing attention to the interrelationships between European and non-European legal systems. One example may be mentioned: Professor Lena Foljanty, today professor of globalization and legal pluralism at University of Vienna, held 2017–2022 the chair for a representative project on “Translations and Transitions: Legal Practice in 19th Century Japan, China, and the Ottoman Empire”.35 When I was appointed professor of legal history at Lund university in 1978 there were, as mentioned, political forces who wanted to abolish legal history in the curriculum. Due to a well-educated minister of education, the chair in legal history was kept – even if the legal historian in the faculty was regarded as anoutsider in relation to my colleagues in the positive disciplines. I remember how they, whenever a historical problem popped up at faculty meetings, always with a teasing attitude said: “This is something for Kjell to take care of.” 134 renaissance for legal history Epilogue 35 E.g. Lena Foljanty, “Legal Transfers as Processes of Cultural Translation: On the Consequences of a Metaphor”, in Noorhaid Hasan & Irene Schneider (eds.), International Law between Translation and Pluralism, Wiesbaden 2022.
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