LL4Y9      Half Unit
Comparative and Transnational Law

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

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In what ways is law similar and different as between different places? Could the answer to this question depend on whether we think of ‘law’ as just legal rules, or also as institutions, ideas, or traditions? Is ‘law’ even a useful category if we want to study cultures that are very different from those we are familiar with? Or for forms of legal ordering that occur beyond the state, for example in international arbitration, or within the EU? These topics – and many more like them - make up the fields of comparative law and transnational law.   

This course covers both the comparison of law and legal institutions from different legal systems and traditions (comparative law), and the study of forms of legal regulation beyond the state (transnational law). For each these two fields, topics for discussion are selected based on their relation to one or both of two broad themes: First, the connections between law and its surroundings (culture, society, and economy); and second, the character of ‘law’ generally (as a form of reasoning, a set of institutional arrangements, a distinctive ‘worldview’, etc.). Studying these two classic themes across of a range different national- and transnational settings allows us to ask a series of more concrete questions, such as: "Why are courts in some legal systems more powerful or more trusted than courts in other systems?"; "Why do some countries send far more people to prison than others?”; ”Is it possible for a legal doctrine from one system to be in some way ‘transplanted’ to another?”; and: "How is 'law' in non-state contexts similar to and different from state law?". 
 
The course combines attention to theory (social- and cultural theory, theories of comparison, and of the transnationalisation of law) with detailed case studies in selected areas from different fields of law (comparative constitutional law, comparative private law, comparative criminal justice, EU law; and commercial arbitration, among others). The course might be especially interesting for students already taking other courses with a comparative- or a transnational law dimension, and for all students interested in the ways law works, and does not work, and in how lawyers and judges think, in different parts of the world. 

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

All students are expected to produce one 2,000 word formative essay during the course. This essay is due in Week 7.

-Mathias Siems, Comparative Law (Cambridge, 3rd edn, 2022)

-Adams, Maurice & Bomhoff, Jacco, Practice and Theory in Comparative Law (Cambridge, 2013)

-Cotterrell, Roger, What is Transnational Law?, LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY (2012)

-Frankenberg, Gunther, Critical Comparisons: Re-thinking Comparative Law, 26 HARVARD INTERNATIONAL LAW JOURNAL (1985)

-Pirie, Fernanda, The Anthropology of Law (Oxford, 2013)

-Reimann, Mathias and Zimmermann, Reinhard, The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law (Oxford, 2nd edn, 2019)

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period