Abstract
<p>Legal history is a product of the modern nation-state. To this day, the discipline remains shaped by these origins. Yet the sources of unease are growing. What are we missing when the focal point of our historical observations continues to be the legal system of Western modernity? Can we still cling today to a concept of law derived from this Western modernity, one that sharply distinguishes law from other social norms? How did the distinctive “German approach” to legal history actually come about? How is the discipline responding to the shift toward practice in the cultural and social sciences? What theories of the reproduction and transformation of normativity across time and space underlie it? Do we really still want to inscribe our observations into the grand narratives of rationalization, secularization, and differentiation? What alternatives are there? A retrospective look at the history of the discipline, a panoramic view of other fields of historical norm research, and an outline of a methodology for an interdisciplinarily informed historical science of normativity provide some answers to these fundamental questions.</p>