Engaging with Foreign Law

This book is about foreign law - the law of a country other than that of the 'national' lawyer and how to engage with it. There are many reasons for engaging with and understanding foreign law. For instance, local law may be underdeveloped, unclear, or deficient, and recourse to foreign law may help strengthen the conviction that change is needed, and even suggest what form it should take. This book shows how to analyze foreign ideas, concepts, and institutions, and then it explains how to 'package' or 're-package' them so as to make the material usable in one's own national context. Engaging with Foreign Law is about legal methodology - more particularly, comparative methodology - as well as substantive foreign law, and it goes a step further than most comparative law works both in terms of content and philosophy. The authors also provide personal impressions and background about the subject and its protagonists, demonstrating to the reader how much comparative law has developed and changed during the last forty years. Engaging with Foreign Law will inform and provoke in equal measure, and will also prove fun to use in the legal classroom setting.