Comparative Law

Comparative law is the study of multiple legal systems. It is an approach to the law that is both challenging and powerful. By paying attention to legal systems other than our own, we can achieve many things. Some of the benefits of adopting a comparative method include:

  1. Helping the lawyer to detach from what she has learnt a legal system is or must be; by understanding other systems, she can understand other ways of seeing what law is, which in turn can help her to understand differently her own legal system.
  2. Offering an antidote to isolation, to parochialism and to the belief that nothing could be worth knowing in other legal systems.
  3. Helping lawyers see law as not merely as a set of rules, but as made up of institutions, actors, cultures, language, and history.
  4. Helping us to see that law need not be viewed only as the creation of the nation-state.

The objects of comparative study are almost infinitely variable: private law, public law, procedure, legal institutions, and so on. This course is designed to be a basic introduction to comparative private law in Europe. Our primary objects of study are English, French and German law2, and the basic private law subjects of contract, tort (or civil liability) and property law. It is important to note, however, that through colonialism and other factors, the law of these three jurisdictions has influenced many legal systems around the world in different ways.

This course challenges students to engage with the formal rules of these three systems, as they are found within their different legal cultures and as they are deployed within different modes of legal reasoning.

By the end of this course, students should be able to:

  • Give a comparative account of major features of English, French and German contract law, tort law, and property law;
  • Identify differences in concepts, outcomes and legal reasoning in the legal systems studied;
  • Assess the significance of differences and similarities between the legal systems studied, and provide explanations for them;
  • Explain how comparative law scholarship reflects a range of goals and a range of methodologies;
  • Articulate and apply the ideas of leading commentators on comparative law whose work has been studied; and
  • Take a critical (evaluative) perspective on the legal rules and legal scholarship studied in the course.