P. G. Monateri (University of Turin — Faculty of Law; SciencesPo, Ecole de Droit) has posted Understanding Comparative Law: Disciplined Estrangement and Legal Meaning across Difference on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This short working paper offers a synthetic account of comparative law for students and nonspecialist legal readers. It argues that comparative law is not simply the comparison of foreign rules or the classification of legal systems. Its central task is to understand how legal meaning changes across institutional, historical, and doctrinal contexts. The paper presents comparative law as a practice of disciplined estrangement: it makes domestic categories appear contingent while making foreign legal forms intelligible without reducing them to familiar terms. It revisits functionalism, legal transplants, and legal globalization to show why comparison requires both abstraction and contextual judgment. The paper’s main claim is that comparative law matters not because it produces universal legal models, but because it trains lawyers to reason across difference.
Recommended.
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