Book Review: Paradigms in Modern European Comparative Law. A History
| Author | Luca Siliquini-Cinelli |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639211072215 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
BALÁZS FEKETE, Paradigms in Modern European Comparative Law. A History. Oxford: Hart
Publishing, 2020, pp 224, ISBN 9781509946921, £70 (hbk).
As an academic discipline, comparative law has been going through a blooming season
for quite a few years now. Several impactful research monographs, special issues of
renowned journals, and acclaimed stand-alone essays have been published in as well
as translated into English and other European languages. In a review of three recent
important comparative law works, Mark Van Hoecke has observed that ‘we may well
be witnessing the rebirth of the discipline as a genuine field of research’(2017, 280).
What characterises this new comparative legal scholarship is that:
Apparent certainties are no longertaken for granted, if not heavilycriticized. These certainties
include the acceptance of the “functional method”as the only or at least predominant method
for comparative research, the “country and Western”approach, which leaves aside non-State
legal systemsand non-Western legal cultures,the idea that comparativeresearch would consist
in simplydescribing (aspects of) twoor more legal systems, a uniquelydoctrinal approachwith
little attention to law’s context, and a more or l ess fixed taxonomy of “legal families”.They
have been replaced by a more scholarly approach to comparative law, starting from research
questions and hypotheses, using methods, including those from the social sciences, which
seem appropriate to find answers to those research questions and to test the hypotheses.
This new approach is clearly characterized by pluralism - pluralism as to the kinds of legal
systems compared (not just State law) and a methodological pluralism.
1
Van Hoecke is one of the two General Editors of the book series within which Fekete’s
Paradigms in Modern European Comparative Law (hereinafter, PMECL) has been published.
His remarks ought therefore to be given proper consideration as indirectly, they set the perim-
eter within which Fekete’s book falls. Fekete’s monograph can indeed be safely placed along-
side all those recent works which shed new, and much-needed, critical light on the nature,
aims, benefits, structure(s), and limits of comparative law qua scholarly endeavour.
PMECL is divided into five main chapters. In addition to these, the book also features
a foreword by Van Hoecke, and an acknowledgement, author’s note, introduction, and a
concluding chapter by Fekete. As the author himself outlines in the opening note, some
chapters (i.e. Chapters 2, 3, 5, and 5) are based on previously published material.
The latter includes the author’s 2011 Hungarian monograph on a similar subject, and
two research articles.
PMECL set itself the task of ‘studying comparative law thinking with a historical
scope’(2020: 3). Specifically, it employs Thomas Kuhn’s paradigmatic reading of
science’s historical development to shed new light on comparative law’s modern experi-
ence, i.e. from ‘from the mid-eighteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first
century’(2021: 5). Adopting this approach, PMECL, itself an exercise in comparative
analysis, identifies and unfolds three paradigms which have shaped comparative law’s
recent history. Overall, Fekete’s appraisal is analytically solid and his argument persua-
sive. PMECL shows a great deal of jurisprudential, historical, and philosophical knowl-
edge on all the themes it covers. It is carefully researched and pleasantly written.
Prospective readers can rest assured that there is much to learn from it.
648 Social & Legal Studies 31(4)
To continue reading
Request your trial