Graziadei and Giraudo on Contested Economic Maps of Legal Systems

Michele Graziadei, University of Turin Faculty of Law, and Marco Giraudo, University of Turin; Collegio Carlo Alberto, are publishing Contested Economic Maps of Legal Systems in the Journal of Comparative Law (2024). Here is the abstract.

Exploring comparative legal discourses through an investigation into the shared worldviews of scholars is both an ambitious and an indispensable program. It is ambitious because a similar exercise requires fresh investigations of legal comparisons on a world scale to be valid. It is challenging because influential worldviews emerge over time and tend to exert their effects over considerable periods of time, hence the need to extend the analysis over entire epochs. Such a vast program is therefore by its nature a collaborative endeavor. At the same time, an effort to approach this topic anew is necessary because the progress of knowledge requires open debate about the central tenets of any academic discipline or branch of learning. The worldviews that underlie many comparisons are among the central tenets of the discipline. Conversely, comparisons based on worldviews that are not openly and critically discussed risk being flawed. Starting from the antiquity, various areas of the world have emerged as cultural, economic, and political units. The division of world into States that enjoy mutual recognition under international law has prevailed in recent times. Throughout the emergence of the current world order, comparisons have been made on the basis of different worldviews. Looking at the field of comparative law, the classification of the world's legal systems into legal families has been a way to give voice to such worldviews. As evidence that worldviews are subject to change, it should be noted that the classifications of legal systems into legal families elaborated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries do not correspond to the later classifications associated with the classic works of René David and Zweigert and Kötz. 1 These in turn are often considered to be outdated (or are qualified) by recent classificatory efforts, or are met with outright skepticism. To be sure, scholars based in socialist countries always presented a different map of the world. Considerations related to the prevailing socialist ideology were a dominant factor in their classification of the world's legal systems. The prevalence of a certain ideological outlook in reconstructing a legal map of the world is not an exclusive prerogative of works that adhered to that ideology. On the contrary, it underlies works that aspire to objectivity. The tendency of key comparative law works to subordinate or to marginalize those systems that do not conform to the Western canon in their ideal map of the world's legal experiences has thus become the target of lively criticism. 2 This criticism maintains that law is not separate from culture, and the culture of European ruling classes adhered to an idea of superiority vis à vis "the other" that was an essential component of imperialistic projects launched by European powers all around the world in the modern and the contemporary epochs. 3 Similar reflections have informed the call for a decolonial comparative law approach coming from leading academic institutions.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.