Why Legal History Matters? Opening of the Webinar

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored that, although only in the digital space, this seminar takes place at the Jagiellonian University. I’m very happy that leading scientists from important research centers across Central and Eastern Europe agreed to take part in the project and in this meeting. I would also like to thank the organizers for their effort in putting this event together. I would like to share two short reflections of why I think the history of law is important for lawyers. Since my professional background is in the philosophy of law, and in particular in legal epistemology, it is from this theoretical perspective that I would like to approach this question. As I said, I would like to make two points. The first is that – as in any other area of culture: in science, art, or literature – history of law is a history of problems and attempts to solve them. Thus, the way we understand what the law is, how it functions, how we design the law for the future, always grows out of the past; the past which is filled with problems, attempts – both successful and failed – at solving them, and new problems arising on the basis of the old ones. This is clearly visible in such disciplines as physics. Imagine that at the times of Thomas Aquinas, some medieval scholar – thanks to a miracle involving time-travel – is able to get their hands on the famous article of Heisenberg in which he used the matrix approach to construct his version of quantum mechanics. And let us assume further that the scholar is capable of understanding the mathematics involved in Heisenberg’s theory. Even under these counterfactual conditions, the physical layer of the theory would be