Interdisciplinary Comparative Law - Tentative Edition

This book advances two arguments. Firstly, comparative legal studies need to develop a deeper connection with non-legal disciplines. Secondly, integrating the comparative and the interdisciplinary perspectives addresses policymakers’ demand for synthetic knowledge in all phases of the policy cycle. These two arguments touch upon several theoretical discussions in the field of comparative legal studies and in interdisciplinary studies more generally. Moreover, the plea for what I will call interdisciplinary comparative law may be addressed to several academic and non-academic audiences: legal and non-legal scholars, legal and non-legal students, different categories of policymakers. Both arguments are controversial and might be rejected by a large share of the comparative law field. The strategy adopted in this book is to translate all theoretical objections into practical challenges to be overcome. This means that in some cases methodological differences, within and outside the comparative legal field, could prevent deep-level integration. But in a good deal of cases, methodological differences can be bridged with focused integration strategies. This book proposes two such strategies, to be used jointly: firstly, tailoring the search for and the communication of comparative legal knowledge to the tasks to be performed in each phase of the policymaking process; secondly, adopting a diagnostic approach to identify the links and interactions among legal and non-legal dimensions of a problem.