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Founded in 2009 at the initiative of several researchers from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, joined by a number of University lecturers, Clio@Themis contributes to the development of debates and scientific exchanges with regard to the history of law. Its creation in France is based on enlargement and enrichment of the traditional perspectives of the legal history. Indeed, the history of law, through more and more varied types of research, concerns now all periods, from Antiquity to the beginning of the 21th century. This broadening of perspectives is not only in a chronological context, but also a geographical one: today, the subject of the history of law is necessarily European, comparative, and reacts to the phenomena of legal globalisation.

As a consequence, far from keeping legal history locked in a complacent study of the past, this journal aims to be an instrument for the critical understanding of the present. It does not intend to separate legal phenomena from social phenomena. In addition to questions about socio-economic factors in the production and reception of the law, it is increasingly important to consider reflections on judicial culture, the formation and circulation of ideas and judicial concepts, practices and representation.

The founders of our discipline did not hesitate to consider judicial phenomena as social phenomena, and proposed bridges between law history and social science. Although nobody today would dispute the links between the history of law and society, here again approaches have been transformed by the new conception of the judicial field which has developed over the 20th century. On the one hand, the undeniable progress of Kelsenian normativity has highlighted the limits of traditional discourse on the historicity of law, and seems to invite law history to re-focus on "purely" legal issues, while favouring links with legal positivists. On the other hand, the changes brought about in the sociology of institutions, professions or intellectual networks have re-invigorated socio-historical research in legal subjects. In addition to questions about socio-economic factors in the production and reception of the law, it is increasingly important to consider reflections on judicial culture, the formation and circulation of ideas and judicial concepts, practices and representation. Convinced of the importance of methodological and theoretical questions, however, we do not intend to promote uniform viewpoints on these aspects of the history of law.

History, Law, Society: these three ideas express, without any doctrinal constraint, our usage of historical method, our focus on legal subjects and our embrace of social science in the broadest sense.

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