The internationalization and globalization of the law has been one of the greatest challenges to the modern nation state. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 emphasized the diversities of the member states in the EU regarding language, history and culture. In late modern jurisprudence the disciplines legal history and comparative law, representing the perspectives of time and space within the law, have increasingly interacted towards a merge. In Europe as well as in the U.S. the field of comparative legal history has been introduced in the curriculum at many law schools, and the need is great for theoretical and methodological discourses and for class material in this field.

The legal historians at the Faculty of Law at Lund University Sweden arranged in 2009 together with European and American colleagues an international workshop on the topic How to Teach European Comparative Legal History. The papers at this workshop are published in this volume. It not only gives interesting theoretical perspectives. It also contributes to the description of the state of art of this expanding and dynamic discipline within the law. Participants at the meeting at Lund met in June 2010 in Valencia Spain to inaugurate the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH).