Regimes of knowledge production in comparative and global legal history: past, present and future?

Comparative law and legal history have a common past, at least in continental Europe. As far as legal historians engage with comparative or global legal studies, both fields also share a number of fundamental problems. Moreover, they are experiencing dramatic changes in the conditions and circumstances of knowledge production, especially due to the dynamic internationalisation, digitisation, and increasing interdisciplinarity of legal scholarship. These changes present both a challenge and an opportunity for the field of comparative or global legal studies. In the chapter, some of these changes in the regime of knowledge production (1st part) and the number of institutional and intellectual challenges that accompany them from the perspective of legal history (2nd part) are sketched. The third part presents a methodology for a legal history beyond the western paradigm of modernity that allows us to engage in a global conversation about law and its evolution over time with as few biases as possible. In the 4th part, some conclusions are drawn with regard to the relevance of these observations for Comparative Law.