Article by David J. Gerber
Globalization brings laws and legal cultures into more direct, frequent, intimate, and often complicated and stressed contact. It influences what legal professionals want and need to know about foreign law, how they transfer, acquire, and process information, and how decisions are made. We might expect the field of comparative law, therefore, to be replete with efforts to comprehend globalization and its impacts on law and to develop strategies for dealing with them. If the central objective of comparative law as a discipline is to “know” foreign law, then these issues should be central to its project. So far, however, comparatists have paid relatively little attention to these influences and their implications. In this Article, I suggest some ways in which the comparative law agenda might be expanded to respond to these challenges.
My central claim here is that globalization calls for increased attention to goals and methods that have been either neglected or little developed in comparative law studies. Specifically, globalization demands development of more sophisticated tools for structuring and interpreting foreign legal knowledge, and it requires more attention to the processes by which legal information is acquired, processed, and transferred.
Note the scope of this claim. Globalization has many effects on legal systems and how they operate, but I am here concerned only with its effects on legal knowledge. The central issue I address is what is involved in “knowing” foreign law—what do we and should we know, and how do we and should we go about knowing it?
In this Article, I first look briefly at the phenomenon of globalization itself and specify how I am using that term. I then review some of globalization's impacts on how legal professionals “know” foreign laws. This leads to the central part of the Article, in which I explore the implications of these types of changes for comparative law and suggest ways in which the comparative law community might respond to the challenges they pose.
About the Author
David J. Gerber. Distinguished Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law. B.A. 1967, Trinity College (Conn.); M.A. 1969, Yale University; J.D. 1972, University of Chicago.
Citation
75 Tul. L. Rev. 949 (2001)