Dealing in Difference: Comparative Law's Potential for Broadening Legal Perspectives

Abstract

Comparative law is a field which by definition deals with and analyzes the other, the different. This characteristic suggests its immediate relevance for major intellectual legal debates and practical legal issues of our time which also focus on the role of the different or other. The diverse communities in contemporary democracies, previously unnoticed within what formerly frequently passed for homogeneous legal cultures, pose increasing and disconcerting challenges to constitutional law's ability to protect the rights of all of a state's constituencies.1 Similarly, the emerging European Union of the next millennium will have to cope with issues of distinctive national traditions and sovereignty within a developing body politic that strives to attain arguably incompatible goals of political and cultural freedoms and, simultaneously, supranational uniformity in legal standards and in political and civil rights. Modern theoretical work in legal scholarship reflects these national and international concerns. Feminist and critical race theory have focused on how to reconcile concepts of justice and equality with the recognition of differences within and among communities whose needs may appear to be mutually irreconcilable, and whose discourses may appear to be mutually incommunicable.2 Contemporary legal and societal issues, as well as contemporary scholarly develop-