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89 Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/tijvrec89 and id is 1 raw text is: TIJDSCHRIFT VOOR RECHTSGESCHIEDENIS 89 (2021) 1-46 REVUE D'HISTOIRE DU DROIT 89 (2021) 1-46 BRILL THE LEGAL HISTORY REVIEW 89 (2021) 1-46 brill.com/lega OK Computer? The digital turn in legal history: a methodological retrospective Florenz Volkaert PhD Fellow Fundamental Research, Research Foundation - Flanders, Ghent Legal History Institute, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium florenz.volkaert@ugent.be Summary This article reviews some of the main debates on methodology in legal history since the Second World War, engages in a dialogue with the social sciences and finally dis- cusses the digital turn in law and legal history, focusing on network analysis. Keywords methodology - history of legal thought - history of legal history - empirical legal studies - digital legal history - network analysis Introduction Recent debates on the methodology of legal history have mainly focused on the distinction between dogmatic1 and contextual approaches to the history of law2. Curiously, legal history as a field has paid little attention to the revolution I I will use 'dogmatic, 'textual', 'internal' and 'traditional' interchangeably throughout the arti- cle. This is so because the traditional method is, well, textual, in the sense that its main focus is the text of the law and how the text of the law was interpreted or explained in the past by various legal actors (in particular judges and legal scholars, i.e. the doctrine and therefore dogmatic). For the same reasons, 'contextual' and 'external' will be used interchangeably. 2 Especially, but not exclusively, legal historians from the United States of America discern a great many more approaches, schools or traditions. For example, compare J. Desautels-Stein, A context for legal history, or, this is not your father's contextualism, American Journal of Legal History, 56 (2016), p. 29-40. DOI: 10.1093/ajlh/njv023; V. Vadi, International law and © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2021 1 DOI:10.1163/15718190-12340011