The Ways of Negative Comparative Law

This book’s essays want to provide the intellectually-sophisticated and ethically-sensitive comparatist with the equipment that will stand comparison in optimal epistemic stead as one embarks upon the journey of elicitation and inscription towards foreign law.

This book’s essays want to provide the intellectually-sophisticated and ethically-sensitive comparatist with the equipment that will stand comparison in optimal epistemic stead as one embarks upon the journey of elicitation and inscription towards foreign law. Negative comparative law argues that foreign law materializes as a cultural statement: every foreign law-text is encultured. And it holds that every comparatist is encultured, too: one is a socialized individual and institutionalized jurist. This double enculturation generates the comparatist’s double bind: how to account for a foreign law being ‘framed’ within a cultural fabric even as one comes to foreign law having oneself been ‘framed’ within another, different culture? One must adopt a realistic stance: understanding of foreign law as it exists is impossible. Foreignness lies beyond description or representation. But such intractability is not disqualifying, the abiding idea being to compare nonetheless, to compare on, if within the unlimited sway of the limit. This book will benefit all law teachers and postgraduate law students interested in the workings of law on the international scene, whether specialists in comparative law, public international law, private international law, transnational law, or foreign relations law – in particular, individuals bringing to bear a critical inclination to their subject-matter.