Law Comparison 'Inner Worthiness'. The Example of Environmental Protection

Abstract

Two basic theses, distinct but closely related to each other, are the focus of this essay. The first one is that globalization, not only economic and technological, but also social and cultural, by affecting the legal plan calls into question comparative law to rethink and reaffirm its own value of critical study of legal and normative issues and experiences, which poses itself, at the theoretical level, as a self-reflective way of knowing the law. The second one is that there are topics, as it is the emblematic case of the environmental protection, which take on the character of ‘foundations’ of law comparison, in the sense of representing a paradigm of a new methodological and epistemological statute of this field of legal studies, which instead of knowing the world through the law, like the classifications (taxonomies) of world legal systems, it seeks to know the law through the world, in its ‘global’ dimension, at once territorial and spatial, particular and common, relative and universal, as polarities that are not oppositional, but complementary.

Keywords: Legal education, Comparative law, Normative spaces, Legal pluralism, Comparative environmental law