The individual factors that have contributed towards altering the way legal historians see themselves are so many and varied that they can only be touched upon briefly here. In jurisprudence, or, more precisely, in legal theory, as the discipline that systematically reflects the methods of legal thinking, it has been noted that law has lost much of its formerly unquestioned relevance with regard to a general notion of justice. Even those who are not radically critical of the notion of ‘justice’ as a factor that can be operated as a means of controlling social processes, nevertheless agree that the existence of law can no longer be legitimised simply in terms of the quest to determine what constitutes a just order. This approach has been fuelled to some extent by the widespread view that legal norms are neither the product of given ideals, nor real configurations subject to deliberation, but impromptu and verbally formulated instruments for regulating socially relevant conflict. On the other hand, the sheer quantity of normative legislation, constantly and rapidly increasing, and the central function accorded to the legal system in the emergence of modern industrial society, have aroused the suspicion that a notion dear to European hearts—codified law as a cure-all against power—may have been mere illusion after all. With that, the naive application of normative legislation has become a problem for the late industrial society of our age. Law and legal consciousness are fundamentally called into question on all sides.

Legal history has inherited the unsolved problems of positivism and historicism from the science of history. If it is true that current and historical reality is tangible only as a verbally mediated product of communication, then conventionally accepted patterns of emergence, conflict and development of thought in the field of law are useful only to a degree. Legal history must be restructured as a science of the history of social communication about law. This calls for integration into social history which, for its part—ever since the departure of the divine creator from the science of history—has required a social theory of some kind as a corset for the ‘blind facts’.

 In determining the object of legal history research, it is to be concluded that legal history is a component part of social history, in this case the social history of the European individual. This means accepting that European societies since the Middle Ages have, to a considerable and ever increasing degree, defined and regulated individual and overall social relations with the aid of normative legislation. All sentences that have the function of assuring expectations and controlling behaviour, irrespective of their origins, are to be regarded as normative legislation. The research aim is to portray historical communication about those who create normative legislation, their share of power in this communication and their interaction in organising the social body. This also involves a detailed description of the legislative products themselves and the communication strategies and successes that have accompanied their application or non-application. All these aspects must be regarded in comparative terms throughout Europe since the Middle Ages. Underlying substrata are likely to be revealed only once European findings are set against the legal history of earlier and non-European societies.

Legal history draws its research logic from the science of history and the scope of its questions from jurisprudence. In this respect it constitutes a basic science at the point of intersection between the history and theory of law. Thus it is capable of stimulating and aiding both disciplines without any detriment to its function as a basic theory of current academic legal studies.