This book’s essays seek to cleanse comparative law of some of the epistemic detritus it has been collecting and that has been cluttering its theory and practice to the point where this flotsam has effectively stultified ‘good’ comparison. While a critique would pursue adjustments to the prevailing model, this text’s negative critique seeks a much more radical refurbishment as it utters an emphatic ‘no’ to the governing epistemology: it pursues, in effect, a deposition and a disposition of the leading epistemic configuration and the various assumptions regarding the acquisition of knowledge about foreign law that inform it. Negative comparative law thus operates at a primordial level inasmuch as it concerns the matter of justice: it aims to do justice to foreign law as foreignness finds itself appropriated and travestied by comparatists for ideological purposes. In the process, negative critique purports significantly to enhance comparative law’s institutional, intellectual, and ethical respectability. 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.

Negative Comparative Law presents a critical manifesto for a radically alternative approach to the theory and practice of comparative law. Harnessing insights from a range of disciplinary discourses, this book advocates for comparative law's rejection of its dominant epistemology and the investigation of the study of foreignness anew.

Presenting a critique of conventional methods in comparative law, this book argues that, for comparative law to qualify as a discipline, comparatists must reflect on how and why they make comparisons. Günter Frankenberg discusses not only methods and theories, but also the ethical implications and the politics of comparative law in bringing out the different dimensions of the discipline. Comparative Law as Critique offers various approaches that turn against the academic discourse of comparative law, including analysis of a widespread spirit of innocence in terms of method, and critique of human rights narratives. It also examines how courts negotiate differences between cases regarding Muslim veiling. The incisive critiques and comparisons in this book will be of essential reading for comparatists working in legal education and research, as well as students of comparative law and scholars in comparative anthropology and social sciences.

"This book's essays aim subversively and resolutely to replace the hegemonic discursive frame governing comparative law. Beyond harnessing negative critique to resist the orthodoxy's self-assured cognitive assumptions, at once unexamined and indefensible, the argument mobilizes negativity as an empowering idea, a resource towards the displacement of the brand of comparative law that has been fostering a closing of the comparing mind. To answer the demands of the moment and herald foreign law research as a creditable intellectual development, one requires to engage in a culturalist theorization and practice of comparative law at radical variance from the prevailing positivist model. The negative turn, then, is a call to comparative action - a comparative motion - in support of the robustly undisciplined thinking that must thoroughly inform research into foreign law. In photography, the negative has been employed productively to generate a positive print. In comparative law, negation wants to affirm edifying epistemic yields. 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"--

Written under the sign of Beckett, this book addresses comparative law's commitment to the deterritorialization of the legal, and in particular its claim to the normative relevance of foreign law locally: for example, in the formulation of statutory choices, judicial opinions or scholarly views. Through interactions across borders have been proliferating, the comparatist's case for the foreign suffers from a persistent failure of institutional credibility, so that references to the laws of other countries remain distrusted. Holding comparative law's travails to be largely self-inflicted - an account of the impoverished world-view its orthodoxy has been maintaining - the twelve essays at hand deprive the field of its epistemic indigences. They invite it to engage in comparison otherwise: an heteronomic strategy sophisticatedly attuned to the place of otherness-in-the-law. As they release their interruptive consequences to generate a necessary theoretical crisis, the writings assembled in this volume draw on twenty years of incisive and authoritative scholarship harnessing the philosophical insights of Adorno and Derrida or Heidegger and Gadamer. The agonistic critique informing this work prompts the examination of pre-eminent topics like difference and dissemination, understanding and translatability, objectivity and truth, tracing and invention. In imparting radical and discerning intellectual equipment, Negative Comparative Law stands for a strong valorization of the legally foreign.

Over the past decades, the field commonly known as comparative law has significantly expanded. The multiplication of journals, the proliferation of scholarship and the creation of courses or summer schools specifically devoted to comparative law attest to its increasing popularity. Within the Western legal tradition, a traditional, black-letter approach to law has proved particularly authoritative. This co-authored book rethinks comparative law’s mainstream model by providing both students and lawyers with the intellectual equipment allowing them to approach any foreign law in a more meaningful way.