Jakko Husa, A New Introduction to Comparative Law
| Pages | 139-141 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Author | |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0404 |
The increasing movement of people and ideas in Europe and around the globe calls for tools to understand the legal and social norms regulating the lives of others around us – either because we ourselves are moving around with our legal mind maps or because people are coming from abroad with their own legal toolkits to live and work where we are settled. In both cases there is a meeting of human beings, with their questions about how public decisions are made here, individual freedoms protected, contracts agreed upon and enforced, social security works, family relationships organised and so on. These questions arise constantly in our interconnected physical and digital worlds. So we search for tools to understand and explain as much as possible the different legal systems in a pedagogic and accessible way. This pressing need to make sense of the legal world around us and communicate its dynamics, strengths or weaknesses may explain why a range of books on comparative law methods have been published over the last few years: M Siems,
Building on a range of previous papers, Professor Husa explains that his objective is to contribute to the scholarly literature on comparative law in highlighting the importance of understanding the “living” law, the law in its context and as it is practiced. He thus advocates moving beyond functionalism. He stresses that comparative law should not only look for similarities but also for differences. He repeats throughout the book that comparative law helps to flag up pluralism in the solutions that are developed over time for social and legal issues. But all this is not really new. So what is distinctively new in this book?
The specific contribution of the book is not the analysis of the weaknesses of functionalism and the mapping of a few competing approaches to comparative law, but the fact that it makes consciously repeated attempts to ground comparative law as a learning enterprise where time is required. The comparatist needs incrementally to gain more confident...
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