Gulliver's Troubled Travels, or the Conundrum of Comparative Law

Abstract

Comparative law is often critiqued as lacking a coherent methology and failing to account for how scholars' cultural myopia affects their comparative analysis. Using Jonathan Swift's famous work as a point of departure, this Review Essay argues that Ugo Matttei's "Comparative Law and Economics" and Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth's "Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order," offer a meaningful response to these critiques. By employing the theoretical approaches of Law and Economics and Law and Sociology, respectively, these books introduce to their comparative law analysis a degree of objectivity that critics argue has been lacking from traditional approaches to comparative law. Finally, the Review Essay argues for the utility of testing hypotheses developed through "Law and ..." methodologies by comparisons with other legal systems.

Keywords: comparative law, law and economics, law and sociology, international arbitration, comparative alw and economics, swift, satire