ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author undertakes an analysis of the biographical and scientific trajectory of a Polish legal historian Juliusz Bardach. While the division of labour in the history of law after 1945 continued the pre-war categorizations, the stress on Roman law and ancient law in research agenda gradually weakened. Bardach's impact on the agenda of the history of law in socialism was complex and multidimensional, though not easy to measure in an exact manner. His scientific biography demonstrates the involvement of legal history in political, academic, cultural and intellectual agendas over the timespan of more than six decades. It also demonstrates the pivotal importance of an understanding of these agendas for a fuller grasp of what the history of law was and could be under socialism.
