Sometimes I envy historians. Not that theirs is a simple task, giving shape to the detritus of past epochs, knitting meaning into the mess of everything. But those searching after lost legal time face an even sterner test. The jurist who deploys genealogy needs to fold an ‘external’ analysis of the evolution of the conditions that frame their field into a normative account that explains its conceptual formation, preferably in a way that yields something novel or at least not wholly predictable about it.

中文翻译：

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联邦主义者投机时间第 9 章：为世界提供法律——英格兰，1635 年至 1830 年

有时我羡慕历史学家。并不是说他们的任务是一项简单的任务，将过去时代的碎片塑形，将意义编织到一切混乱中。但那些在失去合法时间后寻找的人面临着更严峻的考验。部署谱系学的法学家需要将对构成其领域的条件演变的“外部”分析折叠成解释其概念形成的规范性说明，最好以一种产生新的东西或至少不能完全预测它的方式。