System Dynamics: Toward a Language of Comparative Law?

Abstract

Goals and methods define intellectual disciplines and the communities associated with those disciplines. Where are we going? and How can we get there? are central questions that structure such communities and their activities.1 The two questions are, or should be, related. Presumably at least, those within the community assume that what they are doing will actually lead to where they want to go. Yet what happens when there is a disjuncture between goals and methods when there are incentives to achieve new objectives, but the tools that have been fashioned to achieve existing objectives have little relevance to the new goals? I suggest in this essay that this is what has happened in comparative law a developmental disjuncture has occurred in the relationship between objectives and methods.2 Certain traditional objectives of those thinking about and using comparative law have shaped its current methods, but new objectives have emerged and others have become more pressing, and current methods often have limited value for achieving them. Focusing on the analytical and cognitive aspects of this disjuncture may, therefore, lead us to more effective strategies for responding to it. The lack of a language of comparative law symbolizes and thematizes the situation of comparative law. Comparative law has no language! It can point to a small set of specialized nouns as its own, but nouns do not make a language. A language develops where members of a community seek to explain aspects of the data or reality with which they deal.3 Physics has a language; sociology has perhaps