Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law

The Yale Law Library has added to its collection a new  member of the Cambridge Companions to Law series, the new Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law . It is edited by two European scholars, Mauro Bussani, Professor of Comparative Law at the University of Trieste and Scientific Director of the International Association of Legal Sciences (IALS-Unesco), and Ugo Mattei, Professor of Civil Law at the University of Turin, as well as Alfred and Hannah Fromm Distinguished Professor of International and Comparative Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law . The contributors to its 18 chapters include law professors from Europe, South America, and the United States, and one American anthropology professor. The work is divided into three parts: Knowing Comparative Law, including chapters on comparative law and neighboring disciplines and comparative law and anthropology among others, Comparative Law Fields covering such topics as comparative administrative law and comparative constitutional law, and Comparative Law in the Flux of Civilizations featuring various traditions such as East Asian, Jewish and Islamic.

For a rich survey of contemporary studies of comparative law see our own Teresa Miguel’s “Comparative Law: Academic Perspectives” in Richard A. Danner and Jules Winterton (eds.), The IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011 written under the auspices of the International Association of Law Libraries  .  This is an updating and revitalizing of my own earlier “Comparative Law: Academic Perspectives and Practical Legal Realities,” in Richard A Danner and Marie-Louise Bernal, Introduction to Foreign Legal Systems, sponsored by the American Association of Law Libraries, New York: Oceana, 1994.

Dan Wade