Overview

Written under the sign of Beckett, this book addresses comparative law's commitment to the deterritorialization of the legal, and in particular its claim to the normative relevance of foreign law locally: for example, in the formulation of statutory choices, judicial opinions or scholarly views. Through interactions across borders have been proliferating, the comparatist's case for the foreign suffers from a persistent failure of institutional credibility, so that references to the laws of other countries remain distrusted. Holding comparative law's travails to be largely self-inflicted - an account of the impoverished world-view its orthodoxy has been maintaining - the twelve essays at hand deprive the field of its epistemic indigences. They invite it to engage in comparison otherwise: an heteronomic strategy sophisticatedly attuned to the place of otherness-in-the-law. As they release their interruptive consequences to generate a necessary theoretical crisis, the writings assembled in this volume draw on twenty years of incisive and authoritative scholarship harnessing the philosophical insights of Adorno and Derrida or Heidegger and Gadamer. The agonistic critique informing this work prompts the examination of pre-eminent topics like difference and dissemination, understanding and translatability, objectivity and truth, tracing and invention. In imparting radical and discerning intellectual equipment, Negative Comparative Law stands for a strong valorization of the legally foreign.

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9781138915176

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Pierre Legrand is Professor of Law at the Sorbonne, Paris.

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