On Hostility and Hospitality: Othering Pierre Legrand†

Abstract

Pierre Legrand’s return to the pages of the American Journal of Comparative Law after nearly twenty years is cause for reflection on the reasons for this prolific comparatist’s absence from one of the discipline’s leading scholarly fora. One reason is the widespread disdain aimed at Legrand as a result of his persistent, sharply critical, and often pointedly personal crusade against the discipline’s accepted approaches and their most prominent practitioners. This is partly the nature of the article he publishes in this collection, which features a no-holds-bared, uncomplimentary assessment of the work of James Gordley. In this Article I argue that Legrand’s exile is a poor response to his sharp-tongued but profoundly important vision for our discipline. The better path, one I try to map here, would be to challenge Legrand by exposing the ways in which his hostility for comparative law’s “established scholars” clashes with the Derridian critical theory that animates all of his work.