Overview

This book presents a unique study of the field of comparative law examining the key differences between schools and approaches and examining their contradictions. Comparative law is depicted in this book as a field of contrarians, jurists who tend to oppose or reject prevailing opinions or established practices. Contrarianism has made it exceedingly difficult to find one’s way in the field where there are drastically varying views on the basic issues. The book guides readers through divisive debates and disagreements and helps to draw useful conclusions. Instead of lamenting comparative law’s feeble place in the legal academia or fantasising about the supposed great future of a unified discipline, the book highlights the collisions and tracks their influence on the field. By focusing on tensions underlying the field, this book encourages readers to think critically while studying law comparatively.

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9781509985562

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Reviews

Of all the sub-disciplines in legal study none is more disputed and disputatious with regard to its nature and purposes than comparative law. The approaches and the controversies have multiplied with the expansion of the subject to the point where this book is extremely timely. We have a plethora of different approaches and contexts, scholars with different purposes as well as fields of endeavour. As the most knowledgeable and accomplished of contemporary comparative law scholars, Jaakko Husa is especially qualified to confront in this book the problem of ‘Contrarian Jurists’, as he calls them. It is hard to think of anyone with his degree of compendious knowledge and wisdom of perspective to make sense of the patchwork quilt, as he calls it, of comparative law through its deep disagreements, and point the way to a pluralist future. * Andrew Harding, National University of Singapore and University of Oxford *

Author Information

Jaakko Husa is Professor of Law and Globalisation at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

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