Guidebook to a Foreign Land

Abstract

Comparative law, a critic might point out, is a foreign country. A kind of “land that time forgot,” comparative law belongs to a more innocent time before cheap air travel and foreign legal qualifications demystified transnational legal practice for many lawyers.1 Those inhabiting this isolated kingdom are oddly monocultural, and their earnest fascination with the foreign seems as outdated as their fixation with “comparison,” a method that was last modish in the nineteenth century.2 Professor Gunter Frankenberg’s important new book, Comparative Law as Critique,3 is a critical guidebook to this charming but parochial land. Written by a long-time observer of comparative law, the book maps mainstream discourses in comparative legal scholarship, subjecting them to the same Orientalizing gaze that comparative law has traditionally cast on non-Western legal systems. The book also provides a thought-provoking meta-discussion on critical scholarship,4 a topical section on Muslim veiling,5 and essays on human rights and access to justice.