Contest

Dear classmates, I had no time this afternoon to show you my little composition, written to test my discourse competences. As a matter of fact, it was not certainly little, because I counted around 120 words. Anyway, if you want to read it, here it is:

I love presentations such as the one we heard today. Firstly because of its interesting subject, and secondly because of the communicative skills of the speaker. I couldn't, however, understand the actual meaning of some of the new things I learned, in particular the procedure of the psychogram. When an architect wants, for example, to draw one of those sketches, he must have a previous image in his mind. As a consequence, his draft will be conditioned by that original idea. There will be, moreover, a certain difference between what he thought and what he drew. I wonder, in short, if the new elements of the future building will  be the result of the mistakes he made during his blind drawing.

Legal History

My field of knowledge is Legal History. In fact, I lecture Legal History at the School of Law.

Should I be able to imagine how you, dear classmates, consider such a thing as Legal History, I could explain in a most effective way a number of relevant issues in order to help you to understand the essence of this science. To tell the truth, I am not very optimistic about the prevailing opinion on the matter, and I have the tendency to believe that normal, intelligent people like you suspect that studying Legal History is not the most exciting way to spend someone’s life.

Legal History sounds like something perhaps vaguely interesting, but of course boring, something which has to do with old libraries crammed with huge, dusty volumes written in Latin, volumes whose contents would remain obscure even though they were translated into modern languages, full as they are of rare words, tricky arguments typical of lawyers and intricate statutes or laws.

It doesn’t look stunningly attractive, not only to normal, intelligent people like you, but also to Historians and Jurists. As a matter of fact, we legal historians feel entirely alone in a sort of no one’s land which is midway between liberal arts and social sciences. We are widely considered by Historians not to be colleagues, and therefore they hardly ever read what we write. As for the Lawyers, they keep so extremely busy with the course of current legislation that they have no time to take a quick glimpse into the past; they don’t read our books and papers either.

In a certain way, they Historians and Lawyers are right. Because if someone is interested in the past, he studies History, and if he is interested in Law, he studies in the School of Law in order to become Lawyer or Judge. Could you imagine a stranger thing than a teenager making up his mind to be a Legal Historian? Of that kind of monster there’s no evidence whatsoever. How, then, is possible the mere existence of Legal Historians? Well, I am deeply convinced of this: we are people lost in the pursuit of a profession.

I myself arrived by chance at Legal History. As a young student wondering about my professional future, a sunny morning of June, many years ago, I went to my father to initiate a serious conversation about the matter. I said I loved History, but he advised me not to invest five years of my life in such an unproductive task as studying History. It was he who successfully persuaded me to try to get a degree in Law in order to become a notary or something similar.

And here I am as a Legal Historian. I am sure that my father didn’t expect this effect as the direct result of his piece of advice. But now I feel it was a good one, because I can develop my love of History, and I am also convinced that it is worth devoting one’s life (its professional dimension) to Legal History.

I will tell you why. Legal History is a linchpin of a jurist education. Every year, at the beginning or the first semester, I ask my students where lies the real cause of the presence of such a subject in our curriculum. They usually answer that in order to understand the Law currently in force we need to know the Law of the past, as though our contemporary Laws and statutes were determined by the ancient ones. It is not difficult to make them understand that they are mistaken: they become quickly aware of the fact that our current Law is the result of the will of the Nation as expressed in the Parliament by its representatives, whose declaration will come into force even if it makes a complete break with the past.  

And that’s precisely the point. Our current Law is the result of our current convictions. Law is something historically determined, in such a way that every society has a different system of Laws which fits the circumstances of culture, time and place. A complete understanding of this statement provides the jurist with an essential critical view about Law, indispensable in order to develop his professional tasks.