Comparative Law Through the Lens of Other Comparative Disciplines

Project period: 2024-2026

Many areas of the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences rely on comparison as a method of knowledge and can look back on long specialist histories and diverging lines of methodological debate. Such insight opens up approaches to comparative law that have not yet been systematically explored. The cross-disciplinary journey through other specialist histories of comparative academia exposes constricted views and allows one to identify comparative law questions that were unconsciously abandoned or decided in advance of genuine consideration. It becomes possible to see where the discipline has become captured by premature consensus or where scholarship has been belligerent and resorted to defensive or reflexive responses.

At the same time, metatrends can be unearthed and researched, such as the shape and the role of debates on ethicization. How do other comparative fields deal with their Eurocentric tradition or with the accusation that comparative cognition is trapped in constructions and implicit agendas? How is the relationship between method and object addressed? And how do other comparative sciences solve the problem of an infinite wealth of material paired against finite linguistic competence – and finite time?