Legal traditions: A dialogue between comparative law and comparative legal history

‘Legal tradition’ is a term frequently used in legal history and comparative law. The increasing interest in global perspectives on law and history, the dialectics inherent in globalisation as such, as well as some tendencies of ‘de-’ and ‘re-tradionalisation’, often enhanced by law, have made legal traditions even more topical. But what does ‘legal tradition’ mean? In this article, I review some characteristic usages of the term by classical authors from both legal history and comparative law, like JH Merryman and Harold J Berman, with special emphasis on the work of Canadian comparative law scholar HP Glenn. Beyond its grounding in contemporary information theory and evidence of an impressive command of legal-historical scholarship, his concept of legal tradition as normative information bears analytical potential for legal historians and should be read as an invitation to dialogue between comparative law and comparative legal history.