Interdisciplinary Comparative Law: Between Scylla and Charybdis?

Even while interdisciplinary approach and comparative law are conceived as a perfect match there are also certain risks. Lawyers are not normally competent sociologists, linguists, economists, anthropologists, historians etc. When a lawyer steps outside of the boundaries of law, the risk of misunderstanding concepts or methods taken from other fields may materialize. However, many of the most pressing problems we see at the moment arise from the reverse situation; that of non-lawyers venturing outside their own specialist field into comparative law. This article looks into just two scenarios where the interdisciplinary approach seems, at first glance, to be an almost perfect methodological solution but more detailed scrutiny reveals something different. The first scenario concerns macro-comparative law and the so-called ‘legal origins’ theory, and the second concerns micro-comparative law and legal linguistics.