Abstract
Legal history is by no means a unitary discipline. A convenient and conventional division can be made between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ legal history. The former is the history of lawyers' law, of legal rules and principles. Its sources are predominantly those that are thrown up by the legal process: principally statutes and decided cases, supplemented where possible with lawyers' literature expounding the rules and occasionally reflecting on them. The latter is the history of the law in practice, of legal institutions at work in society rather than legal rules existing in a social, economic, and political vacuum. This article discusses the historical foundations of legal historiography, the professionalization of legal history, internal legal history, and external legal histories.
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