Kjell-Åke Modéer

The internationalization and globalization of the law has been one of the greatest challenges to the modern nation state. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 emphasized the diversities of the member states in the EU regarding language, history and culture. In late modern jurisprudence the disciplines legal history and comparative law, representing the perspectives of time and space within the law, have increasingly interacted towards a merge. In Europe as well as in the U. S. the field of comparative legal history has been introduced in the curriculum at many law schools, and the need is great for theoretical and methodological discourses and for class material in this field. The legal historians at the Faculty of Law at Lund University Sweden arranged in 2009 together with European and American colleagues an international workshop on the topic How to Teach European Comparative Legal History. The papers at this workshop are published in this volume. It not only gives interesting theoretical perspectives. It also contributes to the description of the state of art of this expanding and dynamic discipline within the law. Participants at the meeting at Lund met in June 2010 in Valencia Spain to inaugurate the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH).

In January 2007 the Faculty of Law at Lund University celebrated the centennial in 2006 of Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Mass., with a symposium entitled Globalization and the U. S. Law School: Comparative and Cultural Perspectives, 1906-2006. The symposium was organized by the professors Stephen C. Hicks (Suffolk) and Kjell Å. Modéer (Lund). The lecturers from this symposium are published in this volume, edited by Professors Hicks and Modéer. The main theme for the symposium was a hundred years of legal education. The first part presented the cultural and educational context at the time of the foundation of the Suffolk Law School in 1906 in the U. S. and Sweden. The second part considerad post-war U. S. law schools with their modern concepts derived from legal realism and their new international academic émigrés from Europe. The third and last part described the current condition of legal education with an increasingly international and transnational paradigm of global law and global law and global law schools.

I denna bok jämförs svensk, tysk och amerikansk rättskultur under "det långa 1900-talet" (1870-2009). Tysk rättskultur påverkade svenska jurister under 1900-talets första hälft. Under efterkrigstiden fick istället amerikansk rättskultur stort inflytande. Modern reformlagstiftning blev ett verksamt politiskt instrument för ­samhällsförändring.1900-talet har utropats som "rättens århundrade" och det seklets jurister har kallats både "samhällsingenjörer" och "fruktansvärda jurister". Med hjälp av rättskulturella parametrar beskrivs hur den politiska kulturen i dessa tre länder präglade juristerna under ett århundrade som inrymde ­såväl demokratins genombrott som totalitära orättssystem. Murens fall 1989 och tillkomsten av den Europeiska unionen genom Maastrichtavtalet 1992 - och det svenska medlemskapet från 1995 - har bidragit till att rätten under det senaste kvartsseklet på nytt har förändrats och därmed också juristernas kunskaper och uppgifter. Internationalisering och privatisering har medfört ett kritiskt förhållningssätt till den värdegrund, de rättsliga institutioner och juridiska yrkesroller som 1900-talet utvecklade. Kjell Å Modéer är professor emeritus i rättshistoria vid Lunds universitet.