The method in comparative law: the contextual approach

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A quick survey of some current works on comparative law will reveal a discrepancy between comparative law in practice, which is widely dominated by a traditional, functional approach, and certain academic voices on methodology, which deplore the predominant “undertheorized” attitude. Methodological literature not only criticizes many of the details of the traditional approach but is often focused on the presumed lack of theory, which directly leads to demands that comparative law should learn from social science, its techniques, models and methods. And indeed, this seems to be the core concern of the critics: they do not accept the existing methods of traditional comparative law because they consider only the analytical methods used in social sciences to be theoretically satisfying and sufficient. This ideological stance in effect tries to import a long methodological debate between different schools within social sciences into comparative law, and to declare only one of those schools to be valid. Eventually, traditional comparatists and their critics have different ways of thinking: While traditionalists simply and pragmatically search for practical and workable solutions to the questions which happen to interest them, many of their critics take an analytical stance, asking for a method which must then always be followed in detail, and which will ultimately provide answers to larger, preferably critical and often abstract questions. The modern answer to this debate is contextual comparative law. It provides a practical and pragmatic approach to legal comparisons. It is based on traditional functionalism and retains its basic ideas, while at the same time avoiding typically functionalist problems and restrictions. Its methodological basis is hermeneutics, which has the added advantage of clearly describing the typical process used by most experienced comparatists: the slow and diligent familiarization with the foreign legal system and its environment; the search for its atmosphere, its style, and its legal as well as non-legal characteristics; and the underlying desire to develop an intuition which allows the comparatist to avoid the typical traps of their topic, and to better understand the way in which foreign law works within its given context.

About the author: Uwe Kischel – Doctor of Law, LL.M. (Yale), attorney-at-law (New York), Mercator Professor of Public Law, European Law, and Comparative Law at the University of Greifswald, Germany.

Citation: Kischel U. (2020) Metod v sravnitel'nom prave: Kontekstual'nyy podkhod [The method in comparative law: the contextual approach]. Sravnitel'noe konstitutsionnoe obozrenie, vol.29, no.2, pp.18–32. (In Russian).

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