Overview

Written under the sign of Beckett, this book addresses comparative law's commitment to the deterritorialization of the legal and its attendant claim for the normative relevance of foreign law locally in the fabrication of statutory determinations, judicial opinions, or academic reflections. Wanting to withstand the law's persistent tendency towards nationalist retrenchment and counter comparative law's institutional marginalization, the fifteen essays at hand impart radical and discerning intellectual equipment in order to foster the valorization of the legally foreign and the comparative motion. In particular, the critique informing this manifesto examines pre-eminent topics like culture and difference, understanding and translatability, objectivity and truth, invention and tracing. Harnessing insights from a range of disciplinary discourses, this book contends that comparatists must boldly desist from their field's dominant epistemology and embrace a practice much better attuned to the study of foreignness.

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9781316511978

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Reviews

'Impeccable scholarship, inimitable style, and relentless critique are the hallmarks of nigh-on three decades of work that culminate in Pierre Legrand's unique and remarkable syntagm Negative Comparative Law. Part author biography, part treatise on method, part satire, and part harangue, the 15 essays comprising the volume cohere lucently and vividly around a critical desire to preserve the ethical sensibility of the foreign, and a crescendo of negative analyses of the addiction to similarity that marks the orthodoxy in comparative legal scholarship.' Peter Goodrich, Journal of Law and Society

Author Information

Pierre Legrand teaches comparative law at the Sorbonne.

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