ABSTRACT
The growing involvement of historians in legal proceedings aimed to address past wrongs was bound to have a wider social impact, the more so as they appeared in trials that had such huge transformative potential. However, for this potential to materialize, no less than full-blown reconceptualization of disciplinary relations was needed. Carl Friedrich, one of the leading proponents of their incompatibility, felt that change was in the air: “It would seem that any reconsideration of ‘law and history’ is apt to be a string of commonplaces or the beating of the dead horse. Yet, both ‘What is law?’ and ‘What is history’ are questions which have not ceased to trouble the reflective students of both fields.”1 Furthermore, these questions were posed with a new urgency, in the context of contribution of these disciplines to social change.
