Contrarian Jurists

Jaakko Husa is Professor of Law and Globalisation at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Of all the sub-disciplines in legal study none is more disputed and disputatious with regard to its nature and purposes than comparative law. The approaches and the controversies have multiplied with the expansion of the subject to the point where this book is extremely timely. We have a plethora of different approaches and contexts, scholars with different purposes as well as fields of endeavour. As the most knowledgeable and accomplished of contemporary comparative law scholars, Jaakko Husa is especially qualified to confront in this book the problem of ‘Contrarian Jurists’, as he calls them. It is hard to think of anyone with his degree of compendious knowledge and wisdom of perspective to make sense of the patchwork quilt, as he calls it, of comparative law through its deep disagreements, and point the way to a pluralist future.

• Preface1. Setting the Scene: Is Comparative Law Developing?2. Placing the Focus -Text, Action, Context3. A Question of Identity - A Tool or Something More?4. Private Law v Public Law and Beyond5. Talking About It vs Doing It6. The West and the Rest7. Area Experts and Generalists8. Functionalism - Proponents and Opponents9. Legal System - Closed or Open?10. Individualisers and Generalisers - Methodenstreit of Our Time?11. ‘For I am nothing, if not critical’ 12. Globalisation and Comparativism - Out of the Trenches?13. Outlook: Sailing the Seas of Diversity and Pluralism