David Fox and Wolfgang Ernst (eds), The History of Money in the Western Legal Tradition: Middle Ages to Bretton Woods, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, xxviii + 892 pp, hb £125.00.

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12208
Date01 July 2016
Published date01 July 2016
AuthorJ. G. Allen
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REVIEWS
Ran Hirschl,Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative
Constitutional Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 304 pp, hb,£29.99.
Comparative Matters marks the conclusion to Ran Hirschl’s constitutional law
trilogy that started with Towards Juristocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007) and continued with Constitutional Theocracy (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Like its predecessors, Compara-
tive Matters shows the same marked brush strokes of exemplary interdisciplinary
inquiry that underpins Hirschl’s mission to emphasise the political dimension
within constitutional law, aided by his dual disciplinary background as a distin-
guished professor of both law and political science at the University of Toronto.
As the title suggests, Hirschl’s argument advances the importance of com-
parison in constitutional law as much as it promotes the adoption of a wider
‘toolkit of methodological considerations’ (186) for such comparative matters.
While he lauds the ‘tremendous renaissance’ (3) of comparative constitutional
law over the last twenty years, he also expresses his concern that the field
remains, ‘as a method and a project . . . undertheor ised and blurry’ (3) with a
‘loose and under-defined epistemic and methodological framework that seems
to be held together by a rather thin intellectual thread: the interest of some
sort or another in the constitutional law of polity or polities other than the
observer’s own’ (5). Comparative constitutional studies, in his view, still lack
a definitional consensus on the meaning and methods of being ‘comparative’.
Hirschl’s self-professed goal is to ‘fill that gap’ (5) at the core of comparative
constitutional studies.
To do so, he proceeds in two steps. First, Hirschl looks to the practitioners.
The ‘View from the Bench’ (Chapter 1) illustrates diverging outlooks and
trends across the world’s highest courts when it comes to voluntary references
to foreign constitutional jurisprudence. With an impressive set of examples,
ranging from the usual suspects, such as the Canadian and American Supreme
Courts, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of
Justice, Hirschl advances his theory of why judges refer to others’ constitutional
jurisprudence with illustrations from perhaps less widely studied jurisdictions,
such as Turkey, Pakistan, India, Israel and Malaysia, among others. Mindful
of the fact that ‘the international migration of constitutional ideas . . . results
from a confluence of factors rather than any single cause’ (75), Hirschl advocates
his argument for the inclusion of a court’s ‘sociopolitical context’ (76) when
analysing its motivations to voluntarily cite foreign jurisprudence. Akin to his
line of argument in Towards Juristocracy, Hirschl emphasises that references to
foreign constitutional jurisprudence can thus be ‘at least as much an identity-
constructing political phenomenon as it is a juridical one’ (76).
In Chapters 2 and 3, Hirschl uses a small sample of selected countries – a
small-N case study approach, as he will explain in Chapter 6 – to present
C2016The Author. The Modern Law Review C2016The Moder n Law ReviewLimited. (2016)79(4) MLR 727–756
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Reviews
a historical step back to pre-modern religion law and early legal schol-
ars, such as Jean Bodin, John Seldon, Montesquieu and Sim´
on Bol´
ıvar. He
demonstrates what he considers to be the first instances of systematic engage-
ment with other legal systems, and suggests that comparative constitutional
scholars can gain a ‘deeper understanding of the considerations and driving
forces – principled, necessity-based, and/or ideology-driven – behind a le-
gal system’s selective engagement with foreign law’ (79) from this historical
excursion.
In the second part, Hirschl follows up on the book’s theme, the benefit
of moving ‘From Comparative Constitutional Law to Comparative Constitu-
tional Studies’ (Chapter 4) through the conscious inclusion of social sciences
and their methodologies, such as political science, development studies, and
sociology. Having made the case for the importance of the social sciences for
the systematic inquiry into causal connections and theory building in com-
parative constitutional studies, Chapters 5 and 6 are then concerned with the
limitations of this social scientific approach (in particular, 205–207) as well as
case selection (232-244) and research design (245-281).
Hirschl ends Comparative Matters with an e pilo gue and t hree t ake away
points: that the history of comparative constitutional inquiry is longer than
we think; that the political (as opposed to the legal or jurisprudential) di-
mension of comparative constitutionalism needs to be taken into account;
and, finally, that the global renaissance of comparative constitutional law can-
not come to fruition without the breaking down of disciplinary boundaries
between law and the social sciences, a plea that will find much approval
across comparative constitutional studies and other comparative legal fields
alike.
What shines through Hirschl’swork is his deep engagement with the contro-
versies currently shaping his discipline. Leading the debate about the role of po-
litical versus legal and jurisprudential factors, Hir schl provides an impressively
international account of constitutional experiences from around the world,
including tensions between universalism and particularism (194ff), Wester n-
centric and inclusive analyses (205-223) and the true meaning of ‘comparative’
in the context of constitutional studies (231).
Hirschl is as much an expert on the nexus between constitutional law
and religion as he is of comparative research methods (the interested reader
is encouraged to refer to Constitutional Theocracy to explore his full think-
ing on the former). Thus, the historical pre-moder n religion law perspec-
tive he adopts in part one offers a fascinating journey into an unknown is-
land of riches when it comes to comparative constitutional insights. Yet the
level of detail in his historical chapters somewhat outweighs the informa-
tional content, and it seems that Hirschl introduces a second mission – to
engage thoroughly with pre-modern religion law – to his stated goal of iden-
tifying an epistemological and methodological canon for comparative con-
stitutional studies. As enjoyable and informative as the read may be, the main
conclusions Hirschl draws about potential motivations for the engagement with
foreign constitutional law might just as well have been illustrated with examples
728 C2016The Author. The Modern Law Review C2016 The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2016) 79(4) MLR 727–756

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