Comparative Legal Scholarship as Ordinary Legal Scholarship

Abstract:
This essay argues that comparative law is not and never will be a distinctive academic discipline. Various counter-arguments based on the alleged distinctiveness of comparative law’s (1) subject-matter, (2) methodology, (3) challenges, and (4) aims are identified and rejected. The essay concludes by arguing that comparative scholars should embrace the ordinariness of their scholarship. To the extent that comparative law is associated with a particular subject-matter, method, challenge, or aim its value will always be a matter for debate. By contrast, if comparative scholarship is just ordinary scholarship with more data (as I argue), its value is undeniable.

Smith, Stephen A., Comparative Legal Scholarship as Ordinary Legal Scholarship (October 10, 2012).

Comparative Constitutional Law and Property: Responses to Alviar and Azuela

Abstract:
I am pleased to have the opportunity to comment on two very rich and provocative articles: Property in the Post-post-revolution: Notes on the Crisis of the Constitutional Idea of Property in Contemporary Mexico by Antonio Azuela and The Unending Quest for Land: The Tale of Broken Constitutional Promises by Helena Alviar García. Both articles offer historical and contemporary accounts of the role of the social function of property in the constitutional framework of the countries they study (Mexico for Azuela and Colombia for Alviar).

I begin this Commentary with a few general thoughts on comparative method, and then engage in a comparison of the articles by discussing three issues they raise. In particular, I consider the tension between individual property rights and social function examined in each article, the possibilities the authors imagine for collective rights and conservation within the property rights regimes they examine, and the views about the role of law the articles express.

Engle, Karen, Comparative Constitutional Law and Property: Responses to Alviar and Azuela (2011). Texas Law Review, Vol. 89, No. 7, 2011.

CALL FOR PAPERS: New Voices in Comparative Law

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF COMPARATIVE LAW

YOUNGER COMPARATIVISTS COMMITTEE

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT: 

New Voices in Comparative Law

The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law is pleased to invite submissions for its second annual conference, to be held on April 18-19, 2013, at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, Indiana. The purpose of the conference is to highlight, develop, and promote the scholarship of new and younger comparativists.

Submissions will be accepted on any subject in public or private comparative law from scholars who have been engaged as law teachers, lecturers, fellows, or another academic capacity for no more than ten years as of June 30, 2013. We will also accept submissions from graduate students enrolled in master’s or doctoral programs.

Scholars may make individual or co-authored submissions. The conference’s Program Committee will assign individual and co-authored submissions to thematic panels according to subject area. Proposals for fully formed panels will also be accepted.

To submit an entry, scholars should email an attachment in Microsoft Word or PDF containing an abstract of no more than 750 words no later than November 4, 2012, to the following address: yccsubmissions@gmail.com. Abstracts should reflect original research that will not yet have been published, though may have been accepted for publication, by the time of the conference. Abstracts should also include the author’s name, title of the paper, institutional affiliation, contact information, as well as the author’s certification that she/he qualifies as a younger scholar. Graduate students should identify themselves as such.

Panels will be announced no later than December 16, 2012. There is no cost to register for the conference but participants are responsible for securing their own funding for travel, lodging and other incidental expenses.