Turning the Curriculum Upside Down: Comparative Law as an Educational Tool for Constructing the Pluralistic Legal Mind

Abstract

As is well known, comparative law enters the curriculum normally only after some substantive law has been learned. The traditional approach first takes the law student's national legal system, with the comparison or foreign law element only coming later as a form of supplement to the standard curriculum. This paper offers some thoughts concerning the teaching and learning of law in a world in which pluralistic and/or transnational elements are commonplace. These plural features stem from the declining authority of the nation state as well as from the strengthening of various forms of sub-national law being in tension with the central system of the state. These developments also include growth of supranational or transnational legal regimes (e.g. EU). The growth of the significance of human rights, especially the considerable growth of the system of the European Convention on Human Rights, has caused national and international legal spheres to overlap. This paper is based on a belief according to which future legal education ought to respond more seriously to the globalisation of law. However, the argument here is preliminary and it offers merely a sketch of essential features with scarce details i.e. this paper is of a somewhat rough design. The theme itself, i.e. transnational law and its effects, is most certainly somewhat fashionable these days.