On 15 December 2022, the Open University Law School hosted the online conference ‘Diversity, Dilemmas and Discoveries: Legal History in the Curriculum’, where I gave a presentation entitled ‘Overcoming the pitfalls of anachronisms’.
Within law curricula, which – despite all academic aspirations – are primarily geared towards educating students to function as legal practitioners, the relevance of legal history is occasionally debated. This raises the question as to what a course in legal history (ideally) should look like, if legal history is indeed to be kept as an integral part of an education in law.
Apart from that, legal history as a discipline carries its own questions, amongst which is the question how to overcome the pitfalls of anachronisms.
An anachronistic approach to legal history is primarily caused by the conceptual and normative frame(s) of reference of people, which includes assumptions regarding the functioning and purpose of law, caused by e.g. cultural and socio-economic factors including education. This means that in order to avoid anachronisms, one has to be aware of these ingrained biases. In my contribution, I argue that, paradoxically, the explicit use of anachronisms in legal historical education can create that awareness, after which we can correct our unjustified assumptions. Furthermore, the use of anachronisms will generate a more thorough understanding both of individual legal concepts and of the dependency of law upon time, place, dominant culture, economic circumstances etc.
In my contribution, I explain how to overcome the pitfalls of anachronisms in legal historical education and present suggestions regarding the implementation of anachronisms in an instrumental way in law curricula. Additionally, I argue that doing so effectively provides an answer to the question regarding the format of legal history courses, after which the question whether legal history is relevant for law curricula can only be answered affirmative.
Publications
Within this project I published a blog entitled ‘Overcoming the pitfalls of anachronisms – and why this matters to all of us’ on 21 December 2022.
A book chapter entitled ‘Anachronisms in legal historical education: pitfalls, benefits and the importance of anachronisms for every lawyer’ was published with Routledge in the series Transforming Legal Histories in 2025.