treatment to the traditional family; otherwise children of divorced cohabitants would be unfairly treated. Practically, there was no reason to discriminate children born out of wedlock, especially as they were almost as many as those born in legitimate family relations.7 Though such a policy today may hardly seem controversial, it was so at the time to many who had grown up during the first half of the twentieth century. In the s the unmarried mother’s “sinfulness” still occasionally instilled social disrespect into her child. If there have been stigmatising phenomena in the history of family law, illegitimacy is surely one of them. The concept of legitimacy has for centuries belonged to the core of family law in general and to the law of inheritance in particular. The test of legitimacy determined who belonged to a family and who did not. By a new corpus of family law had made illegitimacy a thing of the past. But did concepts such as legitimate heir and born in and out of wedlock disappear from the law on the strength of some new ideology alone, or must we look behind the ideologies to find a sufficient explanation of what was cause and what was effect? Unfortunately legal scholars rarely devote much interest to the question of the law's interaction with socio-economic dimensions of society, neither do they spend much effort investigating the question as to how legal concepts change and vary over time. 118 Legitimacy and new family law pattern 7 G. Walin, Föräldrabalken och internationell föräldrarätt. (Stockholm 1990: Norstedt.) - L. Tottie, Äktenskapsbalken och promulgationslag m.m., (Stockholm 1990: Norstedt.) - A. Agell, Familjerätt 1: Äktenskap, samboende, partnerskap, (Uppsala 1998: Iustus.) - G. Inger, Svensk rättshistoria, 194-208, 261-272. (Stockholm 1997: Liber.)
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