Contrarian Jurists

The Story of Comparative Law and How Collisions Shaped It

Jaakko Husa (Author)

Contrarian Jurists

The Story of Comparative Law and How Collisions Shaped It

Jaakko Husa (Author)

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Description

This book presents a unique study of the field of comparative law examining the key differences between schools and approaches and examining their contradictions.

Comparative law is depicted in this book as a field of contrarians, jurists who tend to oppose or reject prevailing opinions or established practices. Contrarianism has made it exceedingly difficult to find one's way in the field where there are drastically varying views on the basic issues.

The book guides readers through divisive debates and disagreements and helps to draw useful conclusions. Instead of lamenting comparative law's feeble place in the legal academia or fantasising about the supposed great future of a unified discipline, the book highlights the collisions and tracks their influence on the field. By focusing on tensions underlying the field, this book encourages readers to think critically while studying law comparatively.

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Preface
1. Setting the Scene: Is Comparative Law Developing?
2. Placing the Focus -Text, Action, Context
3. A Question of Identity - A Tool or Something More?
4. Private Law v Public Law and Beyond
5. Talking About It vs Doing It
6. The West and the Rest
7. Area Experts and Generalists
8. Functionalism - Proponents and Opponents
9. Legal System - Closed or Open?
10. Individualisers and Generalisers - Methodenstreit of Our Time?
11. 'For I am nothing, if not critical'
12. Globalisation and Comparativism - Out of the Trenches?
13. Outlook: Sailing the Seas of Diversity and Pluralism

Product details

Published	May 28 2026
Format	Ebook (PDF)
Edition	1st
Pages	208
ISBN	9781509985555
Imprint	Hart Publishing
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Jaakko Husa

Jaakko Husa is Professor of Law and Globalisation…

Of all the sub-disciplines in legal study none is more disputed and disputatious with regard to its nature and purposes than comparative law. The approaches and the controversies have multiplied with the expansion of the subject to the point where this book is extremely timely. We have a plethora of different approaches and contexts, scholars with different purposes as well as fields of endeavour. As the most knowledgeable and accomplished of contemporary comparative law scholars, Jaakko Husa is especially qualified to confront in this book the problem of 'Contrarian Jurists', as he calls them. It is hard to think of anyone with his degree of compendious knowledge and wisdom of perspective to make sense of the patchwork quilt, as he calls it, of comparative law through its deep disagreements, and point the way to a pluralist future.

Andrew Harding, National University of Singapore and University of Oxford