Comparative Law

Comparative law has always struggled to find its place in international legal scholarship. Some scholars have tried to make sense of the differences and similarities between what comparativists and internationalists do. Yet we remain in an era of doubt about the value of cross-border, multi-linguistic comparisons. This has been a long era. German Professor of comparative law, Bernhard Grossfeld wrote back in 1984 of a ‘deep skepticism’ about the ‘non-transferability of law’. Much more recently, scholar of gender and international law, Darren Rosenblum, described comparative law’s unpopularity, with its ‘near-empty dance card’. Yet I was reminded of comparative law’s true value when I...