Comparative law and the legal origins thesis: "[N]on scholae sed vitae discimus "

American Journal of Comparative Law

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 863-876

  Curran, Vivian Grosswald ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 72449182309     PISSN: 0002919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5131/ajcl.2008.0027     Document Type: Review

References (133)

1. Thomas C. Dawson, Stiglitz, the IMF and Globalization (June 13, 2002), IMF web site, available at http://www.inf.org/external/np/speeches/2002/061302. htm (last visited Apr. 5, 2009).
2. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work, ix-x, 41, 226, 277 (2006) ;
3. Globalization and Its Discontents 10 et seq. (2002). Stiglitz is not alone in this claim;
4. see also, e.g., Catherine Caufield, Masters of Illusion: The World Bank and the Poverty of Nations 330-38 (1996).
5. Id. (emphasis added).
6. See id.
7. See infra notes 20-22, and surrounding text.
8. See Fernand Braudel, Histoire et Sciences sociales La tongue durée, 13 Annales E. S. C. 725, 728 (1958).
9. Ralf Michaels, Economics of Law as Choice of Law, 71 L. & Contemp. Probs. 73, 77 (2008).
10. Arild Sæther, Pufendorf: The Grandfather of Modern Economics, in Samuel PUFENDORF UND DIE EUROPÄISCHE FrÜHAUFKLÄRUNG. WERK UND ElNFLUSS EINES deutschen Bürgers der Gelehrtenrepublik nach 300 Jahren (1694-1994) (Fiammetta Palladini & Gerald Hardtung, eds., 1996). Pufendorf was an important influence on Hutcheson and Adam Smith.
11. See, e.g., Peter Stein, From Pufendorf to Adam Smith: The Natural Law Ttradition in Scotland, in Europäisches Rechtsdenken in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Festschrift für Helmut Coing 1667-1679 (Norbert Horn et al. eds., 1982) ;
12. Andrew S. Skinner, Pufendorf, Hutcheson and Adam Smith: Some Principles of Political Economy, 42 Scot. J. Pol. Econom. 165 (1995).
13. Pufendorf studied mathematics at Jena under Erhard Weigel, whom the American Mathematical Association's Mathematics Genealogy Project lists as having had ten students in his lifetime, and, in the more than 350 years' time since he received his own Ph. D. in 1650, as having had 57, 709 mathematical Ph. D. "descendants."
14. See Mathematics Genealogy Project, available at http://genealogy. math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=60984 (last visited Apr. 14, 2009). For more on Pufendorf and economics
15. see also Jeffrey T. Young, Law and Economics in the Protestant Natural Law Tradition: Samuel Pufendorf, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith, 30 J. Hist'y of Econ. Thought 283 (2008).
16. Cf. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays 20 (1973).
17. See Wolfgang Ernst, Fritz Schultz (1879-1957), in Jurists Uprooted: German-speaking Émigré Lawyers in Twentieth-century Britain 105, 171-79 (Jack Beatson & Reinhard Zimmermann eds., 2004).
18. The acronym "LLSV" derives from the names of the authors who developed the theory in Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei Schleier & Robert Vishny, Law and Finance, 106 J. Pol. Econ. 1113 (1998).
19. A more recent article on the subject appeared as Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, & Andrei Shleifer, The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins, 46 J. Econ. Lit. 285 (2008).
20. See the summaries of Legal Origins in accompanying essays in this volume. E.g., Ralf Michaels, Comparative Law by Numbers? Legal Origins Thesis, Doing Business Reports, and the Silence of Traditional Comparative Law 57 Am. J. Comp. L. 765 (2009) ;
21. John Reitz, Legal Origins, Political Economy, and the Problems of Generalization, 57 Am. J. Comp. L. 847 (2009).
22. See 2009 AALS Comparative Law and Law and Economics Joint Session materials, The Doing Business Reports by the World Bank and the Legal Origins Thesis: Is Economics Replacing Comparative Law?, available at https://memberaccess.aals.org/eWeb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=sesDetails&ses- key=6dlf 1267-69f5-4e54-8d0a-6e09e94463ba;
23. see also Simon Deakin, Legal Origin, Juridical Reform and Industrialization in Historical Perspective: The Case of the Employment Contract and the Joint-Stock Company, 7 Socio-Econ Rev 35 (2009) (quoting in part La Porta et al., The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins, supra note 12, at 325 (The legal origin hypothesis is one of the most significant ideas to have emerged in the social sciences in the past decade, and it is also one of the most influential. The Doing Business Reports of the World Bank, which incorporate the legal origins approach and methodology, rank countries according to how well their legal environment supports enterprise. The rankings, it is said, have 'encouraged regulatory reforms in dozens of countries.'") (inner citation omitted) ;
24. Michael Graff, Legal Origin and Financial Development: New Evidence for Old Claims? The Creditor Rights Index Revisited, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH, Working Paper No. 197, at 16, Apr., 2008), available at http://ssrn. com/abstract=ll35595 (LLSV "is perceived as an important building block in the ongoing search for the ultimate sources of economic growth and development") ;
25. Michaels, supra note 13.
26. See http://www.ifc.org.
27. See The World Bank Group, Doing Business, available at http://www.doing business.org. ("The Doing Business Reports") ; for the rankings
28. see http://www.doing business.org/economyrankings/;
29. LaPorta et al., The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins, supra note 12;
30. Graff, supra note 14;
31. Curtis J. Milhaupt, supra note *.
32. See Mathias M. Siems, The End of Comparative Law, 2 J. Comp. L. 133, 144 (2007) (noting that the EU Commission's impact assessment on the Directive on Shareholders' Rights's refers to LLSV studies "in order to justify their recent reform" in that area).
33. For instance, La Porta and his colleagues cite such comparatists as John Henry Merryman and Mirjan R. Damaška. La Porta et al., Economic Consequences, supra note 12, at 289, 303, 304 (citing Merryman) and 286, 305 (citing Damaška).
34. See Philippe Ariès, Histoires des populations françaises et de leurs attitudes devant la vie depuis le XVIIIe siècle 9-15 (1948)
35. esp. id. at 13 (defining "mentalité" as people's "attitude towards life") ;
36. Braudel, supra note 6. Pierre Legrand has stressed the importance of the concept of mentalités to comparative law in much of his work.
37. See, e.g., Pierre Legrand, Le droit comparé (1999) ;
38. Pierre Legrand, Against a European Civil Code, 60 Mod. L. Rev. 44 (1997) ;
39. Pierre Legrand, European Legal Systems Are Not Converging, 45 Int'l & Comp. L. Q. 52 (1996) ;
40. Pierre Legrand, How to Compare Now, 16 Legal Studies 232 (1996) ;
41. Pierre Legrand, Comparative Legal Studies and Commitment to Theory, 58 Mod. L. Rev. 262 (reviewing Peter de Cruz, A Modern Approach to Comparative Law (1993)). For more on the applicability of the concept to comparative law
42. see Vivian Grosswald Curran, Globalization, Legal Transnationalization and Crimes Against Humanity: The Lipietz Case, 56 Am. J. Comp. L. 363, 364, n. 9, and surrounding text (2008) ;
43. Vivian Grosswald Curran, Romantic Common Law, Enlightened Civil Law: Legal Uniformity and the Homogenization of the European Union, 7 Colum. J. Eur. L. 63 (2001) ;
44. Vivian Grosswald Curran, Cultural Immersion, Difference and Categories in U. S. Comparative Law, 46 Am. J. Comp. L. 43, 50, 53 (1998).
45. See Milhaupt, supra note *, at 836 (2009). Milhaupt and co-author Katharina Pistor also have used the equally excellent phrase "the long sweep of time."
46. Curtis J. Milhaupt & Katharina Pistor, Law & Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic development Around the World 25 (2008).
47. Braudel, supra note 6.
48. See id. at 729, 734.
49. See La Porta et al., Law and Finance, supra note 12;
50. but see La Porta et al., The Economic Consequences of Legal Origins, id.
51. Braudel, supra note 6, at 752.
52. Oliver Sacks, In the River of Consciousness, N. Y. Rev. Books, Jan. 15, 2004, at 41, 44.
53. Cf. Braudel, supra note 6, at 752 ("les fleuves changeants du temps" ["the changing rivers of time"]).
54. Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective (posthumously published in 1950).
55. See, e.g., Peter Burke, History and Social Theory 14-15 (Cornell Univ. Press, 2d. ed. 2005) (1992). Halbwachs, like Bloch, died during the Second World War but Lucien Febvre, Bloch's Annates co-founder, continued running the journal after Bloch's death until Fernand Braudel took over at Febvre's death in 1956.
56. Jan Assmann, Collective Memory and Cultural Identity, 65 Cultural History/Cultural Studies 125, 125 (John Czaplicka trans., 1995).
57. Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik 41 (2006).
58. Assmann, supra note 28, at 130.
59. See id. at 133.
60. See Michaels, supra note 13;
61. see also Mathias M. Siems, Legal Origins: Reconciling Law & Finance and Comparative Law, 52 McGill L. J. 55, 62, n. 32 (2007).
62. See Landon Thomas, Jr., Known for Tight Spending, I. M. F. May Have to Loosen Reins After G-20 Windfall, N. Y. Times, Apr. 5, 2009, at 12.
63. See also Milhaupt, supra note * quoting World bank, Economic Growth in the 1990s: Lessons from a Decade of Reform 26 (2002) ("those who advise or finance developing countries will need more humanity in their approaches, implying more empathy with the country's perspective and more inquisitiveness in assessing the costs and benefits of different possible solutions").
64. See The IMF and the Worldbank, Factsheet, June, 2009, available at http://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/imfwb.htm.
65. See also Hossein Askari, Clear-out Time for IMF, World Bank, Asia Times, Oct. 28, 2008, available at http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/ article/209/42708.html ("They now duplicate each other to a point that many ministers of finance and heads of central banks do not know the difference between the World Bank and the IMF.").
66. See 2009 AALS Comparative Law and Law and Economics Joint Session materials, supra note 14.
67. See e.g., Mireille Delmas-Marty, Les forces imaginantes du droit (vol. I, Le relatif et l'universel, 2004;
68. vol. II, Le pluralisme ordonné, 2006;
69. vol. III: La REFONDATION DES POUVOIRS, 2007).
70. Three major books on comparative law have been published in the last few years: Comparative Law: A Handbook (Esin Örücü & David Nelken eds., 2007) ;
71. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann eds., 2006) ;
72. Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and Transitions (Pierre Legrand & Roderick Munday eds., 2003).
73. Alan Watson, Legal transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law 1 (1993).
74. Richard Hyland, Evening in Lisbon, in Festschrift für Claus-Wilhelm Canaris zum 70. Geburtstag 1175 (Andreas Heldrich et al. eds., 2007) ("comparative law has lost much of its practical raison d'être").
75. Accord, Siems, supra note 17.
76. The common law-civil law divide is one such example, given that today "we all live in a mixed jurisdiction. " David V. Snyder, Contract Regulation, With and Without the State: Ruminations on Rules and Their Sources. A Comment on Jürgen Basedow, 56 Am. J. Comp. L. 723 (2008).
77. Esin Örücü concurs, Esin Örücü, The Enigma of Comparative Law: Variations on a Theme for the Twenty-first Century 149 (2004). Örücü cites Pier Guiseppe Monateri for the proposition that this always has been the case.
78. Id. at 138, citing P. G. Monateri, The "Weak" Law: Contamination and Legal Cultures, in Italian National Reports to the XVth International Congress of Comparative Law 107 (1998).
79. For the contrary view that comparatists precisely are not those best suited to this task
80. see Siems, supra note 17, at 146.
81. Alain Badiou, L'Éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal 47 (1994) (citing Lacan).
82. I take the word "polycontextual" from Gunther Teubner's term "polycontexturality" in Gunther Teubner, State Policies in Private Law? A Comment on Hanoch Dagan, 56 Am. J. Comp. L. 835, 837 (2008).
83. See Mark Freedland, Otto Kahn-Freund (1900-1979), in Jurists Uptooted, supra note 11, at 314
84. quoting O. Kahn-Freund, The Study of Labour Law - Some Recollections, 8 Industrial L. J. 197, 200 (1997).
85. See François Ost, Le droit comme traduction (manuscript on file with author) ; François Ost, Traduire: Défense et illustration du multilinouisme (2009) ;
86. Vivian Grosswald Curran, Comparative Law and Language, in Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law, supra note 37, at 675.
87. For the idea that globalization has meant the realignment into functionalist spheres
88. see, e.g., Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (2004) ;
89. Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Klaus A. Ziegert trans., Fatima Kastner ed., 2004).
90. Remarks of Guy Canivet, then Premier Président de la Cour de cassation, given at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School, 2007 (author's personal notes) ; more generally, for published comments on the Court of cassation's embracing comparative law techniques
91. see Guy Canivet, The Court of Cassation: Looking into the Future, 123 L. Q. Rev. 401, 410 (2007).
92. Guy Canivet, L'Influence de la comparaison des droits dans l'élaboration de la jurisprudence, in Études offertes au professuer Philippe Malinvaud 133, 139 (2007).
93. See Olivier Dutheillet de Lamothe, Judges' Roundtable, 3 Int. J. Con. L. 550-56 (2005) ;
94. Judges in Contemporary Democracy: An Internal Conversation (Robert Badinter & Stephen Breyer eds., 2004).
95. Remarks of Justice Stephen Breyer, given at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School, 2007 (author's personal notes). For the most recent remarks of Justice Ginsburg
96. see Adam Liptak, Ginsburg Shares Views on Influence of Foreign Law on Her Court and Vice Versa, N. Y. Times, Apr. 11, 2009, available at http://www.ny times.com/2009/04/12/us/12ginsburg.html. For an account of opposition to the Supreme Court's use of foreign law
97. see Austin Parrish, Storm in a Teacup: The U. S. Supreme Court's Use of Foreign Law, 2007 U. Ill. L. Rev. 637 (2007).
98. International Law in American Courts, from Speeches of Justice Scalia, Ninoville, at http://www.joink.com/homes/users/ninoville/aei2-21-06.asp.
99. See, e.g., Roderick A. Macdonald & Jason MacLean, No Toilets in Park, 50 McGill L. J. 721 (2005) (in special issue: Navigating the Transsystemic).
100. See Molière, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme Act I, Scene 6 (1670) ("Par ma foi! il ya plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien" ["Upon my word! I have been speaking prose for more than forty years now without having the slightest idea of it"]).
101. See Matthias Reimann, The End of Comparative Law as an Autonomous Subject, 11 Tul. Eur. & Civ. L. For. 49, 50 (1996) (advocating making comparative law "part and parcel of other courses").
102. See, e.g., Simon Deakin, Legal Origin, Judicial Form and Industrialization in Historical Perspective: The Case of the Employment Contract and the Joint-Stock Company, 7 Socio-Econ. Rev. 35 (2009) ;
103. Siems, supra note 32;
104. Milhaupt, supra note *.
105. See Curran, Cultural Immersion, supra note 19, at 68-71.
106. Richard Primus, A Brooding Omnipresence: Totalitarianism in Postwar Constitutional Thought, 106 Yale L. J. 423, 424 (1996).
107. See Curran, Cultural Immersion, supra note 19.
108. This term is Professor Sacco's. Rodolfo Sacco, Diversity and Uniformity in the Law, 49 Am. J. Comp. L. 171, 180 (2001). Professor Sacco referred to my own work in this area as espousing an ideology of difference, in Cultural Immersion, supra note l9, an article which, however, as its title suggests, specifically addressed the situation of comparative law in the United States and from the vantage point of the crisis for comparative law within the country due to the loss of the generation of multicultural, multilingual émigré comparatists. In the case of some comparatists, the description may be justified, however. For instance, Pierre Legrand writes: (Pubitemid 33636472)
109. I argue in favour of incommensurability as the radical absence of common ground between different orders of legal knowledge. "Common ground, " any "common ground, " must assume a met al.anguage; but the empirical fact is that there is no met al.anguage that can dispense with idiomaticity. What there is across laws, and all there is, is an abyss-an untranslatable abyss. For me, comparison is thus the site of a problem, rather than a solution.
110. Pierre Legrand, Econocentrism, 59 U. Toronto L. J. 215, 215 (2009).
111. See Vivian Grosswald Curran, On the Shoulders of Schlesinger: The Trento Common Core of European Private Law Project, 11 Eur. Rev. Private L. 66, 69 (2003).
112. Mathias Reimann, The Process and Failure of Comparative Law in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, 50 Am. J. Comp. L. 671, 679-80 (2002).
113. Ralf Michaels, The Second Wave of Comparative Law and Economics?, 59 U. Toronto L. J. 197, 203 (2009).
114. See Reimann, id., at 685-95 (comparative law field has been a failure in terms of developing theoretical and methodological foundation).
115. Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality 43 (Henry Hardy ed., 1996).
116. Id. at 60.
117. Id. at 63.
118. Id.
119. Id.
120. Id. at 62.
121. I take the term from Martti Koskenniemi, The Politics of International Law - 20 Years Later, 20 Eur. J. Int'l L. 7, 11 (2009).
122. Cf. id., in which Koskenniemi imputes such a motive to international law.
123. For Char's view of the role of the poet
124. see generally René Char, Fureur et mystère 65-81, 85-149 (2d ed., Gallimard, 1967) (1962) ; on the more specific idea of Char's conceiving of the the poet as the man standing upright
125. see Vivian Grosswald, L'Homme debout dans la poésie de René Char (unpublished manuscript, 1973).
126. See id.; Vivian Grosswald Curran, La sécurité juridique à l'ère de la mondialisation, 110 Revue du Notariat 311, 313, n. 5 and surrounding text.
127. Geertz, supra note 10.
128. Id.
129. Id. See also Berlin, supra note 63, at 48-49 ("not everything, in practice, can be-indeed... a great deal cannot be-grasped by the sciences. For, as Tolstoy taught us long ago, the particles are too minute, too heterogeneous, succeed each other too rapidly, occur in combination of too great a complexity, are too much part and parcel of what we are and do, to be capable of submitting to the required degree of abstraction, that minimum of generalisation and formalisation-idealisation-which any science must exact... Natural science cannot answer all questions.").
130. See Florian Faust, Comparative Law and Economic Analysis of Law, in Oxford Handbook, supra note 37, at 837-65;
131. Gillian Hadfield, The Strategy of Methodology: The Virtues of being Reductionist for Comparative Law, 59 Toronto L. J. 223, 228 (2009).
132. Michaels, supra note 62.
133. Francis Bacon, Preparative Towards a Natural and Experimental History, in Collected Works of Francis Bacon: Volume IV: Translations from the Philosophical Works, 255-56 (John Spedding et al. eds., 1976, reprint of the 1875 edition). I am grateful to Professor Freeman Dyson for introducing me to this passage and directing me to its source.