Teaching Comparative Law, Pragmatically (Not Practically)

Comparative legal studies, that is the theorizing about legal comparisons or the actual practice of contrasting two or more legal cultures, can be a rich source of epistemological insights for law in general.In particular, it has been shown to act as a tool of critical thinking.However, for students to actually grasp the critical potential of comparative law, more than just theoretical knowledge needs to be transmitted.It is crucial, this article will argue, to nurture a specific philosophical attitude, to be drawn along the lines of pragmatism, towards law and knowledge in general, with teaching playing an important role in bringing about this attitude.While the teaching of comparative law was discussed in sufficient detail in the past, it currently attracts less attention from academics in a context in which interest in the theory and practice of comparative law does not cease to grow.This investigation will discuss a series of pedagogical practices, meant to facilitate the educational mission of comparative legal instructors.These will range from the choice of subjects to be examined and materials to be read to the type of tasks to be assigned to students in their confrontation with legal alterity.The teaching of comparative law was much debated in the 1950s (Dainow 1951;Graveson 1950;Sereni 1951;Schlesinger 1954;Harding and Cueto-Rua 1955;Mueller 1958;Mayda 1959) and then, again, in the 1970s (Hazard 1971;Winterton 1975).Although the field generally called 'comparative law' has known many theoretical developments since the second half of the 20th century (for an inventory of the major developments, see Legrand and Munday 2003), the way in which comparative law is being taught has been given little attention (see, however, Waxman 2001; Ireland-Piper 2019; Varga 2020a).