” Legal  institutions are created at a certain point in time, intended to be applied to ‘life’ as it is perceived (by the legislators or judges or jurisprudents who create them) at the specific time when they are elaborated and cast into legal form. (…) However, some legal institutions—which I propose to call ‘legal survivals’—prove to be so exceptionally durable that they outlive the epoch in which they were created and continue their legal life long after the conditions which lead to their creation had, in the meantime, disappeared, testifying to the resilience of juridical form. Being a flagrant exception to law’s adaptation to changing circumstances (…) and its general discontinuity after revolutions (….), legal survivals—placed, as they are, at the interstices of law’s continuity and discontinuity—are a properly ‘borderline concept’, i.e. ‘one pertaining to the outermost sphere’ (…) of the juridical form. It is due to this intensity with which legal survivals embody law’s features, as well as the fact that they represent a borderline case, rather than the routine, that their study can illuminate our understanding of the juridical phenomenon more generally and the resilience of legal forms in particular. If, following Agamben (…), we concede that ‘philosophy can be defined as the world seen from an extreme situation that has become the rule’, legal survivals are a privileged gate to the philosophy of law.  „

(Rafał Mańko, Legal Survivals and the Resilience of Juridical Form. Law  & Critique (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09357-2)