is. l'.\ en if this were the ease, it would he of minor rele\ anee to us. for it is how an historian uses a -I'ord in her sentence structure •åw(\ how she directly and indirectly refers to //which to me are the truer indieations of how she reallv understands a particular word (or the concept of it), not the dictionary definition she would give. Our authors' narrati\ es contain numerous references which are suggesti\ e of law 'being' something, of ha\ ing a nature or an essence, howet er unrefleeted and intuiti\e such remarks ma\' seem. One ma\' call these remarks the obiter dicta of legal theort' and it is through a close texrual analysis of them that 1 attempt to reconstruct the more or less unspoken understandings of law (legal theories) of our authors. What is 'law' in their narratives.' What is the law in the bistort' of hni'r Qjdest-ee (jue le droit dims I'histoire du droit.^ lias ist das Reeht in der Wcchi'^geschichtei A close reading and analysis of image constructions embedded in a text requires some classification of sorts and this is where more traditional legal thetiry comes in. 1 will make use of the traditional 'schools' of thought in legal theory (natural law, or naturalism as 1 will refer to it in this essay, positix ism and legal realism, along with historism," albeit the latter being long since discredited), as 1 find them practical within the confines of this essay. By means of these four labels, one can attempt to decipher the latent legal theor\’ of the three textbooks, d’his is howet er not the onh’ approach. 1 would prefer to employ a functional perspective to legal theory and therewith also deconstruct the traditional legal theories, as that would open up the analysis to even more interesting aspects, but 1 have not come that far and must let this more crude categorisation into the four 'schools' suffice for now. 7 7
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