Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology

Abstract

Global Justice Reform: A Comparative Methodology. By Hiram E. Chodosh. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 240p. $45.00.This book is a greatly needed assessment of the methodologies used to study and implement justice reform. By asking a range of pointed questions on judicial reform whose answers have largely been assumed, Hiram E. Chodosh lays bare basic concepts and debates in order to understand whether they are truly logical, consistent, and useful. The scrutiny with which the author subjects the field of comparative law helps make it much more rigorous, since, as he points out, even an empirically rich comparative framework will result in poor findings if its methodology is inconsistent and its objectives unclear. He carefully explains comparative method, illuminates approaches ranging from cross-national comparisons to intranational comparisons, and analyzes benefits of comparisons, such as the creation of continuums. With this comprehensive and insightful assessment, he criticizes comparative law's failure to adopt a method for objectively assessing the results and value of a comparison that is “flexible enough to grasp a wide variety” of processes and institutions (p. 17). He shows how classifications, prototypes, evaluation mechanisms, and other building blocks of comparative study are often too deterministic or unclear, and how the lack of objective criteria leaves central debates—such as over the wisdom and practicality of transferring a feature of one country's legal system to another—unresolved. “Without clarity of purpose,” he concludes,” it is difficult to determine the content of what to report” (p. 16).