Introductory Remarks on Comparative Law and Interdisciplinarity

Summary

1. This project was ambitious. Not only because of the scope of the research undertaken, but also because it aimed to consider multiples and mixed approaches of different legal cultures. It is therefore fundamental in my opinion to analyse some ideas on the operation comparison itself in the context of an inter disciplinary work, which we have undertaken here, to really try to understand or at least grasp what is at stake in this project.

We should primarily keep in mind the debates surrounding legal systems, legal cultures and legal traditions. Within the debate, culture, or (sometimes) its very close ‘ally’, tradition, have become a crucial notion. The idea of culture in general and legal culture in particular, gives a large place to memory, a social memory conceptualized as a sort of super ego, a sort of entanglement of heideggerian temporality combining time, chronology of past, present and future.

There are of course types of societies that are traditional and some non-traditional. The main point for us here has to be the law itself, as it connects to these conceptions. Each type of society faces a certain type of law, and the matter escalates when we link those points to the classical divide tradition and modernity, but also its Enlightenments’ derivative, the new rearranged divide tradition and rationality.

For Western Europe (or Western European and country) and its tradition of comparison (Twinnings) in civil law tradition, there are according to Glenn elements of traditional chtonic and talmudic that give clues about why and where some legal definitions are coming from, opening our eyes to what are specific legal identities. In the common law tradition, it all derives, again for Glenn, from an accident resulting from the conquest of England by the Normans. The smallest common denominators, important elements of the comparison, are definitely the alleged core of the ancient traditions. On the one hand, in common law, we have the use of oral “through the accumulation of precedent,” creating “a body of common experience” through memory/ ies. On the other hand, in Southern Europe, the civil law tradition, appears rooted in writings, in the tradition of chthonic and Talmudic, as explained by Glenn, that goes much deeper than the rational explanation of roots located in the writings of Roman Empire, through the codex.