'how It Actually Was'? a Historian Responds to 'on Historical Contextualisation'

I found Lorie Charlesworth's article welcome, perceptive, impressively researched and, insofar as it is a manifesto, worthy of support. Here, I am singling out a small (though significant) part to comment on, largely because I find so little to disagree with in the rest of it. Her argument seems familiar, with good reason. In many ways the socio-legal project's relationship with black-letter law appears analogous to that between the study of social history and of political history. One half of each pair is a traditional preserve of the academy, while the other is often a provincial upstart, demanding that academic work can legitimately be focussed on everybody and everything, not merely the internal concerns of a ruling or cultural elite. The usual sites of such turf wars are the issues of methodology and personnel. Yet as well as the contestation between, there is a contradiction within, as Charlesworth (pp.11, 12) appreciates. For both social history and political history (and it appears also for sociolegal history and black-letter legal history) there is a tension within the proper relationship between the past and present. This tension is about the extent to which we allow the pre-occupations of the present to influence the study of the past, and it affects not merely our choice of topics of interest, but also our epistemology.