Pierre Legrand teaches comparative law at the Sorbonne.
This book´s essays want to provide the intellectually-sophisticated and ethically-sensitive comparatist with the equipment that will stand comparison in optimal epistemic stead as one embarks upon the journey of elicitation and inillegalscription towards foreign law. Negative comparative law argues that foreign law materializes as a cultural statement: every foreign law-text is encultured. And it holds that every comparatist is encultured, too: one is a socialized individual and institutionalized jurist. This double enculturation generates the comparatist´s double bind: how to account for a foreign law being `framed´ within a cultural fabric even as one comes to foreign law having oneself been `framed´ within another, different culture? One must adopt a realistic stance: understanding of foreign law as it exists is impossible. Foreignness lies beyond deillegalscription or representation. But such intractability is not disqualifying, the abiding idea being to compare nonetheless, to compare on, if within the unlimited sway of the limit.
This book will benefit all law teachers and postgraduate law students interested in the workings of law on the international scene, whether specialists in comparative law, public international law, private international law, transnational law, or foreign relations law – in particular, individuals bringing to bear a critical inclination to their subject-matter.
I The fair foot and the weak mind; II The institutionalization of it all; III Wrong words and the wrighting; IV My talk at Harvard; V Selfness exorbitant; VI The foreign preponderates; VII Comparative contraventions; VIII Animal law, comparatively speaking; IX A very partial glossary; X Appreciation Index of matters Index of names
This book´s essays want to provide the intellectually-sophisticated and ethically-sensitive comparatist with the equipment that will stand comparison in optimal epistemic stead as one embarks upon the journey of elicitation and inillegalscription towards foreign law.
