Giuliani on Past, Pastness, and the Broad Present: Changing Images of Time in Legal History

Adolfo Giuliani, Infolaw Research Project, is publishing Past, Pastness and the Broad Present: Changing Images of Time in Legal History in Law and Spatio-Temporal Dimensions (S. Zorzetto, P. de Lucia, P. Heritier et al., Springer, 2025). Here is the abstract.

"How does the past relate to the present, how does being connect to becoming?" This question confronted legal history when it emerged as an academic discipline in early nineteenth-century Germany. Its significance reverberated throughout legal science -- but provoking three successive responses, which this paper categorises as past, pastness, and broad-present. (i) In the nineteenth century, scholars viewed the past as a pristine ideal to be reconstructed for guidance, its unbreakable connection to the present forming a cornerstone of legal science. (ii) The twentieth century, influenced by scientific and philosophical breakthroughs, saw past and present merge into a "pastness" that encompassed collective experiences and reflected a new understanding of law-making. (iii) The twenty-first century has expanded this temporal awareness into what scholars call a "broad present" or "long-now"-which at any given time individuals try to make present (or represent) again.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Meyler on Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant @StanfordLaw

Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School, is publishing Aesthetic Historiography: Allegory, Monument, and Oblivion in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant in volume 2 of Critical Analysis of Law (2018). Here is the abstract.

This essay turns to Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 book The Buried Giant for insights into the moral and political implications of the kinds of historiography chosen in the aftermath of atrocity. The Buried Giant foregrounds monument, oblivion, and its own form, allegory, as historiographical strategies. If monuments aspire to bring the past into an eternal present, functioning as a kind of symbol, the novel indicates the impossibility of this goal. At the same time, it rejects oblivion’s efforts to entirely remove the traces of prior atrocities. The Buried Giant instead presents a version of allegory as an alternative mechanism for engaging with and negotiating a troubled inheritance. The allegory in question neither involves a one-to-one correspondence between events of the novel and national or international struggle, nor does it simply bring the reader from its particulars to a universal truth. It rather suggests a reciprocal reading of particulars through the windows they furnish upon each other, looking at medieval Britain as though through the lens of post-WWII Japan or examining England’s imperial past from the perspective of its prehistory in a time out of memory. This variety of allegory bears a family resemblance to that extolled by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, both of whom contrasted allegory with the symbol, and to Christopher Tomlins’s efforts to produce a Benjaminian historiography.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Legal History and Methodology

C. G. Bateman, University of British Columbia, has published Method and Metaphysics: A Legal Historian's Canon at 23 The Journal Jurisprudence 255 (September 2014). Here is the abstract.

In the following research I discuss a number of issues which are fundamental to my understanding of how best to reconstruct past human events from the methodological outlook of a legal historian. Herein one will find an explanation of and justification for the various aspects of the historical method and philosophy I employ in my larger research area involving the Roman Emperor Constantine, the Christian Church, and state sovereignty. I also discuss some lines of intersection between modern day legal actors and historians to show how their common goal of getting to the truth of a question may encourage the former to consider using some of the same hermeneutical tools as the latter. History as a discipline has always been primarily concerned with humans and their actions, and this has been noted by many historians: Marc Bloch and R.G. Collingwood come to mind as being two of the strongest proponents of this dictum. Since the field of human events in the past is so large, I suggest it behooves us, then, not to confine ourselves too narrowly within our investigations concerning the hermeneutical tools we employ in the study of the multivariate ways that humans have acted and existed since their appearance some two-hundred thousand years ago: and to this end I employ Sub specie aeternitatis as my research’s inclusive-contextual raison d'être. This perspective requires an acknowledgment that scholarly observations about the reality of the human condition from other disciplines must be employed in the effort to be as wide-ranging in our research method gathering as the historical method will allow: and thus a number of key contributions from authors in various academic fields will be discussed to highlight the relative importance of their ideas to my own. I will be using examples within my own area of study to engage these ideas and this will better acquaint the reader with how I approach historical data. This discussion will be purposely focused on the foundational ideas upon which my own historical method is based. This will enable the reader to better appreciate how it is that I as a historian come up with suggestions about what it was in history that most likely happened. I conclude that as a historian my highest goal must be to offer an imaginative re-construction of an historical event and its concomitant personages which is based on extant data, but which also must engage in a participatory re-thinking pursuant to the motivations of the characters involved such that the end result can be read as an intelligible whole.

Another Review of David Rabban's Law's History

Roy Kreitner, Harvard University Institute for Global Law and Policy, and Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, has published Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and Villains, at  1 Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 96 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This is Roy Kreitner's contribution to the symposium on David Rabban's book “Law’s History: Late Nineteenth-Century American Legal Scholarship and the Transatlantic Turn to History”.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

A Review of David Rabban's Law's History

Ron Harris, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, has published The Politics of Historical Narratives: Comment on David Rabban’s Law’s History at 1 Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 81 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This is Ron Harris's contribution to the symposium on David Rabban's book “Law’s History: Late Nineteenth-Century American Legal Scholarship and the Transatlantic Turn to History”.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.