This chapter begins with a brief introductory note on the role of legal history in ancient Roman law, and the legal scholarship of medieval glossators and commentators. It then turns to the dominant schools of continental legal scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ‘Neo-Bartolists’ and the usus modernus pandectarum. It considers the rise of the Historical School in Germany and the corresponding movements elsewhere in continental Europe. Methodologically, the representatives of the Historical School were the first professional legal historians in the modern sense of the term. Finally, the chapter retells the story of the rise of European legal history in the post-war period, and the recent trends towards a creation of global legal histories. It shows that legal history’s turns have in many ways followed from not only legal scholarship in general, but also from developments in historical science and global politics.