This chapter explains how New Institutional Economics (NIE) presents an innovative, interdisciplinary approach for topics of comparative law. It discusses the core principles of NIE and how they relate to the principles of comparative law. New Institutional Economics is a natural partner to comparative law and is especially useful in the study of law in context. The chapter discusses the contribution that the combined approach of NIE and comparative law brings to the scholarship of law. NIE provides ‘institutions’ as an easily understandable tertium comparationis. The chapter concludes with a call to add NIE to the comparative law methodological toolbox as a strategy to develop a sound analytical framework through which to better understand and more aptly rationalise the divergences and convergences observed in the laws of different countries.

Chapter 3 examines the intriguing question of how contrasting pragmatic data is possible. We argue that not every instance of interaction can be contrastively examined – rather we need to identify our tertium comparationis. In so doing, it is fundamental to consider the phenomenon of conventionalisation, i.e. the degree of recurrence of a particular pragmatic phenomenon in the language use and evaluations of members of a social group or a broader linguaculture. We argue that the cross-cultural pragmatician needs always to consider whether the phenomena to be compared are sufficiently conventionalised in the respective linguacultures or not. We discuss various situations, such as lingua franca contexts, in which conventionalisation can be a particularly complex issue to consider. We point out that conventionalisation manifests itself in two intrinsically interrelated types of language use, namely, convention and ritual, which play an important part in our analytic framework.