Development of Comparative Law in Central and Eastern Europe

The region of Central and Eastern Europe covers many of the European nations east of Germany. The dominant nation of the region is Russia. Between Russia and Germany there are, first, a number of small nations composing the region known as Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia); second, the nations which formed the western part of the Soviet Union; and, third, the states on the Balkan peninsula. This article shows the rich history of comparative law before the installment of communist regimes, such as the era of Stalin, and then discusses comparative law under communism and the role and status of comparative law after the fall of communist rule.

Comparative Law and Religion

This article examines the link between comparative law and religion. The first section examines the scholarly literature on interrelationships of comparative law and religion, which is skimpy, to say the least. The second section examines religious influence on diverse families of law. The third section looks at the impact of civil religions on law. The fourth section discusses religious dimensions of law. The fifth section considers the relationship between world law and world religion.

Comparative Law and the Europeanization of Private Law

The gradual emergence of a European private law is one of the most significant contemporary legal developments. Comparative law scholarship has played an important role in this process and will continue to do so. This article discusses the Europeanization of private law as a new and challenging task for comparative law. The second section considers the Europeanization of private law, describing the creation of the European Union and the role of the European Court of Justice. The third section discusses European legal scholarship. The fourth section cites the contributions of comparative law. The last two sections discuss current and future trends for the European private law.

Comparative Law and Comparative Knowledge

Methodological investigations should abstain from normatively imposing one's own epistemological interests on others. This article analyses different forms of comparison and comparative knowledge in order to clarify these ideas. Two lessons may be particularly important for the comparative lawyer. First, historical linguistics reminds other comparative disciplines not to be content with judgments of similarity. Unearthing genetic relations between different systems may add considerably to comparative knowledge. The second lesson concerns the conceptual and theoretical structure of tertia comparationis. Of course, lawyers have always been aware of the fact that comparison may entail the necessity of developing suitable instruments for neutrally describing the legal systems compared. But compared to practitioners of comparative religion or comparative history, lawyers have made relatively little progress in this regard.

Comparative Criminal Law

The first section of this article describes criminal law's parochialism. The second section discusses the histories and functions of comparative criminal law. The third section discusses selected topics in comparative law, such as punishment theory, victims, jurisdiction, the principle of legality, an analysis of criminal liability, and general principles of criminal liability. The last section discusses comparative criminal law in context. The discussion notes that comparative criminal law is best seen as one way to gain critical distance from a given system of criminal law by placing it within a larger context.

Comparative Constitutional Law

This article examines the evolution of the field of comparative constitutional law and its relationship to politics and international rights; constitutionalism; constitutional foundings and transformations; constitutional structures; structures of judicial review; generic constitutional law; and national identity. Innumerable comparative studies address the ways in which different constitutions and constitutional systems deal with specific topics, such as privacy, free expression, and gender equality. However valuable such studies have been in bringing information about other constitutional systems to the attention of scholars versed in their own systems, their analytic payoff is sometimes questionable. Scholarship in comparative constitutional law is perhaps too often insufficiently sensitive to national differences that generate differences in domestic constitutional law. Or, put another way, that scholarship may too often rest on an implicit but insufficiently defended preference for the universalist approach to comparative legal study over the particularist one.

Unjustified Enrichment in Comparative Perspective

Unjustified enrichment confronted both civil and common lawyers with thinking which was often completely outside the paradigm to which they had become accustomed. The recognition of unjustified enrichment as a cause of action in its own right in English law created a new arena of uncertainty between the systems. This article argues that comparative lawyers can make an important contribution to the future of the fractured and fractious world of unjustified enrichment. It may help to uncover the enormous wealth of learning of which both the common law and the civil law are the repositories, and so bring the same level of understanding to the law of unjustified enrichment which has, over the years, been achieved between the systems in regard to contract and tort.

Comparative Sales Law

The story of comparative law in the field of sales contracts is inextricably linked to Ernst Rabel. Rabel not only prepared the basis for any comparative study of the modern law of sales in his epochal treatise Das Recht des Warenkaufs, but also initiated the process of world-wide harmonization of the law of international sales. The close interrelation between comparative law and uniform law is also apparent in the life and the work of Ernst Rabel as his treatise on the law of sales developed from the preparatory work he had done for the UNIDROIT project to create a uniform law for international sales in the 1930s. The second section of this article outlines the most important projects in this area and their interaction with comparative law. The third section discusses selected characteristic features of the law of sales which are interesting from a comparative point of view.

Development of Comparative Law in Latin America

Latin American law has largely been neglected by mainstream comparative law. The presumed ‘familiarity’ and the consequent perception of Latin American law as lacking sufficient originality, or rather exoticism, may explain why comparative works have often dedicated considerably more attention to Islamic, Hindu, and East-Asian law. The topics of both Latin American law as the object of comparative law, and comparative law as a subject in Latin American jurisprudence, have remained in the shade with the result that they have become battlegrounds for influence and domination. This article aims to provide a rough sketch of the development of comparative law in Latin America and its significance for, and impact on, the legal systems of the Latin American countries today.

Development of Comparative Law in East Asia

This article discusses the development of comparative law in East Asia, focusing on the area of private law. It also focuses primarily on Japan, although it also considers developments in Korea and China as well. The article also looks beyond the development of the discipline and outlines more generally some challenges and perspectives for comparative law in the near future. The modern legal systems of Japan, Korea, and China were once all shaped by the reception of Western legal models, albeit to varying degrees and in a variety of ways.