Comparative Law: A Very Short Introduction

This slim volume by two Italian professors of comparative law is to be commended for what it distils into 130 very readable pages. The concise, clear prose provides room for practical examples.

The book focuses on the evolution of comparative law as an academic discipline. It includes an impressive summary and contrast of the world’s legal traditions. These are inevitably high-level but sufficiently informative to provoke thought and entice the reader (whether novice or specialist) to consider further study.

The bibliography of mostly specialist academic work will, however, be largely inaccessible to the general reader and is more to validate the content than to provide avenues for the novice to pursue. A list of ‘next step’ books would have been helpful.

The authors lament that their subject is sometimes seen as the ‘Cinderella of legal sciences in perennial search of an audience’. Hopefully Comparative Law will encourage new audiences to take an interest. Like Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme speaking prose all his life without realising it, legal practitioners working in an international context spend their lives in comparative law. Often they do not think of it as such, evaluating which governing law to choose, explaining their own system to foreign clients, highlighting areas that are different or learning how another system works as they help clients do business abroad.

The book contains many salutary exhortations that are as applicable to practitioners as to academic researchers. Getting to know the law of others is a powerful tool for grasping the peculiarities of one’s own system. One must enter into the logic of the other system without bringing one’s own prejudices or preconceptions, looking not for the equivalent rule but for how the other system addresses the same issue within its own social, cultural, historical and legal context; avoiding the dangers of taking the same word or term in one law and assuming it has the same scope and meaning in the other law. And for lawmakers, it conveys the message that learning from others’ experience and seeing alternative ways of achieving the same outcome are as important in law as in everything else.

Charles Clark is a partner consultant at Linklaters, London