Legal Cultures, Legal Paradigms and Legal Doctrine: Towards a New Model for Comparative Law

Abstract

The aim of this article is to re-consider the theoretical foundations of comparative law in the light of markedly differing world legal cultures. In essence the reader is presented with the fact that there appears to be within comparative law, differing levels of the enterprise, ranging from sociological/anthropological research carried out accross significant cultural divides to comparison accross the borders of nation states who find their laws being compared against a similar cultural and paradigmatical background. The article considers aspects of legal culture and how they might be harnessed in the reconstruction of a paradigm of legal families. The article also reconsiders the importance of legal doctrine for comparative analysis, from the internal perspective of one of the four identified legal cultural families - western legal culture. In the context of the reconsideration of theoretical approaches certain concepts relating to a defintion of law need to be considered these being: law as rules, law as culture, and law as an instrument of integration. Some paradigmatical fields and elements are been distinguished which might be useful as a framework for comparative analysis and for identifying new ‘legal families’ replacing the traditional, but outdated, ‘legal families’ distinctions.