The Modern Development: 1900–1945

Abstract

Abstract Sustained scholarly comparative law activities coincided with the establishment of scientific research at leading American law schools. Chapter 6 reviews the new field of comparative juristic inquiry that emerged from both idealistic and practical concerns. Jurists drew from history, social science, and traditional legal sources to provide new perspectives. Woodrow Wilson was a prominent legal comparatist. Following the 1898 Spanish-American War, the peace treaty ceded sovereignty over the Philippines to the United States, which took a course of indirect and consensual engagement. A few jurists knowledgeable in the civil law worked with American institutions and government to support foreign legal reform, including in China after it became a republic in 1912. Organized American comparative law began in earnest with the 1904 St. Louis Universal Congress of Lawyers and Jurists. The American Bar Association created the Comparative Law Bureau in 1907, with annual meetings and a Bulletin. Comparatists developed teaching materials, set up graduate programs, and supported expanded comparative law libraries. In 1925, bureau members established the American Foreign Law Association. They also took a leading role in forming the International Academy of Comparative Law, with Roscoe Pound and John Wigmore as active members. German-American juristic relations in the 1930s were complicated with the rise of Nazis in Germany and anti-Semitism in American universities. However, several U.S. law schools accepted émigré legal scholars much to their mutual benefit, while a few Catholic-affiliated university law schools and philosophy and government departments took in those who revived an interest in natural law jurisprudence.