Sources Of Law and Legal Method in Comparative Law

Sources of law serve to separate the province of law from the realm of non-law. Only propositions that are derived from a valid source of law are genuinely legal propositions. This article outlines the role of sources of law and legal method in the study of comparative law. The second section explains why these topics have been central to comparative legal scholarship from its very beginnings. The third section attempts to clarify their ambit for the purposes of comparative study, and identifies the pitfalls lurking for the comparative lawyer who wants to determine another system’s sources of law and the methodological approach prevailing there. The fourth section gives an overview of the most important comparative studies specifically dedicated to these matters. The fifth section maps out some areas which merit further research.

Comparative Law and Economic Analysis of Law

This chapter discusses the relationship between comparative law and economic analysis of law. After providing an overview of the characteristics of the economic analysis of law, it explains how one of the two disciplines can operate as an ancillary discipline to the other; this has been termed ‘Comparative Law and Economics’. The next section describes how comparative law and economic analysis of law can be brought together by making one discipline the subject matter of the other. It suggests that the role of economic analysis of law may be greater in case law systems than in codified systems and that this role may vary according to the subject of legislation. The section concludes with considerations on the role comparative law plays and should play in different contexts. Finally, it is argued that comparative law and economics should not be considered a discipline on its own.

Comparative Law and Legal History

Legal historians have sometimes studied the law of one place and time while disregarding that of others. Comparative lawyers have sometimes compared the law of different jurisdictions while ignoring the historical reasons they are alike or unlike. The consequences have been unfortunate. Historians have often explained rules which are ubiquitous by the circumstances peculiar to one time and place. Comparative lawyers have often explained the similarities and differences among laws with a blind eye to how they arose. To understand how these problems came about, this article examines the origins of legal history and comparative law. It then describes, more concretely, why these disciplines need each other. Legal rules acquire their structure over time. Thus even if a comparative law scholar were only interested in the structure of modern rules, he would need the help of history.

Comparative Law and Legal Culture

The idea of legal culture has had an important place in major recent debates about the nature and aims of comparative law. The idea of legal culture entails that law should be treated as embedded in a broader culture of some kind. This culture may, but need not necessarily, be seen as wider than the lawyer’s or lawmaker’s professional realm of law. Often, however, conceptions of legal culture encompass much more than this professional juristic realm. They refer to a more general consciousness or experience of law that is widely shared by those who inhabit a particular legal environment, for example, a particular region, nation, or group of nations. Culture appears fundamental—a kind of lens through which all aspects of law must be perceived, or a gateway of understanding through which every comparatist must pass so as to have any genuine access to the meaning of foreign law.

Comparative Legal Families and Comparative Legal Traditions

For much of the twentieth century, comparatists have divided the world into ‘legal families’ (such as the civil law, the common law, socialist law, etc.) and assigned each (national) legal system a place in one of them. The chapter argues that this taxonomic enterprise has largely remained at the descriptive state, entailed a misleading division into fixed categories, and that is has failed to produce real comparison between laws. It is also too static, state-centred, and Euro-centric to be workable under conditions of late twentieth and early twenty-first century globalism. It should be replaced by the paradigm of ‘legal traditions’ which not only emphasizes the evolving nature of law, but also avoids dividing the world into clearly separated groupings. Instead, a ‘legal traditions’ approach focuses on the fluidity, interaction, and resulting hybridity of laws, thus facilitating their comparison. As it is not tied to Western-style national legal systems, it can easily capture the laws of the whole world, including the increasingly important non-state forms of legal normativity. Since the chapter was written by the late H. Patrick Glenn over a decade ago, the editors added a postscript bringing the reader up to date on the scholarship on, and the debate about, legal families and traditions.

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 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.

Comparative Labour Law

This article proceeds in four stages. First, it takes up the emergence of labour law and its comparative offspring as a discipline. Second, it provides a crude taxonomy of comparative labour law scholarship. Third, it treats the role comparativism has played in the development of national labour policy from the nineteenth century to the present. Fourth, and to come full circle, it situates the comparative study with respect to the contemporary quandary of labour law as a discipline. Comparative labour law was born fast upon the construction of labour law as a subject of instruction and academic study. Even from the beginning, however, it was far from clear what labour law was. Today, that question has recrudesced: labour law is a discipline in search of an identity and, to some, a future. Consequently, attention rightly turns first to the root of which comparative study is a branch.

Comparative Succession Law

It cannot be denied that the law of succession often projects a static image. One possible explanation for this is the fact that certain areas of the law of succession are indeed somewhat technical. However, this article examines comparative research, private international law, examples of trust and the transfer of estate to argue that there are changes that have been detected and explained principally through comparative scholarship in the field of the law of succession. The first is the significance of common social and economic changes and their impact on aspects of the law of succession. The article stresses the intimate relationship between the law of succession and family law. The identification and analysis of these changes have also been the stimulus for a new ‘mission’ for comparative researchers in the field of the law of succession—the quest for greater harmonization, especially in the European context.

Comparative Tort Law

Tort law has always been one of the major areas of comparative law. Whereas the law of property, even today, remains on the outskirts of comparative learning, the law of extra-contractual liability has attracted much interest from comparative law scholars. This article considers general clauses versus a variety of individual torts, the scope of protection, the liability for fault, strict liability, and tort law and insurance. It also discusses the choice between the tort system and no-fault insurance schemes. Finally, it addresses the challenges raised by digitalization. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the solutions offered, the principles and the commentaries thereon certainly provide a valuable starting point for further scholarly efforts and critical discussion.