Book Review by James Gordley
Basil Markesinis's basic question is why, as Peter Birks has said, comparative law today is “in a ghetto,” marginalized, and cut off from mainstream legal scholarship? It is a cri de coeur. He has devoted thirty-five years to comparative law and is one of the recognized masters of the field. Why is the field in such a state?
Not because of lack of talent, at least in the 1960s when Markesinis studied. He describes that age as “a golden age of heroes” of scholars such as: René Rodière, André Tunc, and Pierre Catala in France; Konrad Zweigert, Hans Stoll, Werner Lorenz, and Ulrich Drobnig in Germany; Gino Gorla in Italy; Otto Kahn-Freund in England; and Max Rheinstein, Rudolph Schlesinger, Jack Dawson, and John Fleming in the United States. The next thirty-five years, according to Markesinis, have been years of decline.
The reason, he says, is that these “charismatic comparatists . . . left us no workable directions as to how to produce the kind of goods they themselves did.” Indeed, “the works of these masters are inadequate as far as leaving us a comparative methodology is concerned and telling us whom to target, how to present foreign law to home audiences, and how to put it to practical use.” He argues that comparative law is of use and that a proper method will show how it can be.
Watching him develop this argument is like watching the advance of a column of armor supported by infantry. The armor column consists of a central claim about comparative law, developed and defended in the initial chapters. The infantry support is a description of how comparative law has been, or can be, of use.
About the Author
James Gordley. Shannon Cecil Turner Professor of Jurisprudence, University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. B.A. 1967, University of Chicago; M.B.A. 1968, University of Chicago; J.D. 1970, Harvard University.
Citation
80 Tul. L. Rev. 325 (2005)