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Journal Articles

Comparative law

2019

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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Words Of Comparative Law, Olivier Moréteau Dec 2019

The Words Of Comparative Law, Olivier Moréteau

Journal Articles

While the word "comparative" refers to a cognitive and intellectual activity supposing that there are several elements to compare, the word "law" is used in the singular, as if law was to be compared to itself The whole phrase indicates that comparison takes place within the study of the law, but the use of the singular does not point to a pluralistic approach: what do we mean by law? Should we not talk about "comparing the laws" or "legal comparison"? With a reflection on the words of the law as a starting point, this paper visits the corpus of comparative …


Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset May 2019

Why Didn't The Common Law Follow The Flag?, Christian Burset

Journal Articles

This Article considers a puzzle about how different kinds of law came to be distributed around the world. The legal systems of some European colonies largely reflected the laws of the colonizer. Other colonies exhibited a greater degree of legal pluralism, in which the state administered a mix of different legal systems. Conventional explanations for this variation look to the extent of European settlement: where colonizers settled in large numbers, they chose to bring their own laws; otherwise, they preferred to retain preexisting ones. This Article challenges that assumption by offering a new account of how and why the British …