Comparative law studies have had a lustrous and rich history. As a result, any new addition to the existing literature faces the dual-faceted challenge of both neatly and concisely summarizing the purpose, function, method, and key issues in the study of comparative law and creatively presenting new ideas, techniques, and themes that move the subject forward. This book achieves both well.

As the title suggests, Part I of the book focuses on the traditional side of the subject. It starts with a chapter on the structure, function, and analytical approaches of comparative law. In brief, comparative law investigates differences between legal systems and builds bridges between them and their underlying legal cultures. It is a device for better understanding both one’s own and foreign legal traditions. As an academic tradition or approach, it is also an analytical instrument with its own unique process and agenda. More than this, as the author rightly points out, comparative law has a positivist function and has often been used as an aid to legislation or law reform.

From there, Part II looks into the methodologies applied in the study of comparative law. Scholars have made tremendous efforts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the many research methods that are vital to this field of study. This Part aims to satisfy the curiosity of comparatists by offering fresh methodological perspectives, which correspond with the limits of the existing comparative law literature. The author not only brings the law and society movement into the domain of comparative law, but also introduces enlightening quantitative techniques into the field. These methodologies are introduced in the book to the extent that they can dispel legal myths and fictions, deconstructing the conventional boundaries of comparative law.

Today, any comparative law book would seem incomplete without touching upon globalization. The new century brings us to the crossroads of a new socio-political era where the potential uses of comparative legal studies can be re-examined with a different agenda or angle. Global contacts and confrontations as well as times of economic and political crises have made comparison (i.e., judging legal systems and the law’s potential role in society) more important than ever. But while globalization is decisively important, it is also too large to be comprehensively covered in a single volume. Instead, the author tactically places his emphasis in Part III, termed global comparative law, on legal transplants, the role of states, and law and development, three of the most challenging and interconnected comparative law issues. One objective the study of comparative law can help achieve is to make predictions about the effects of national and other legal reforms more reliable. Tracing developments in the relationships between national legal systems and thus exploring the tendencies of convergence or divergence is therefore presented as a coherent legal issue dealt with in this Part as a whole.

Part IV concludes the book by presenting comparative law as an open subject. Part IV makes an attempt to convey the potential for comparative law analysis, and to offer some new perspectives of what comparative law is and what it might become. This Part outlines some open paths for further inquiry. Again, it is not possible to present the subject of comparative law in a comprehensive and complete fashion. Therefore, raising questions for further research may be more useful than trying to answer some in the limited space of the book.

This book brings comparative law from its present conventional status in legal scholarship to the centre of attention by relying on some innovative techniques and presenting some fresh angles. More importantly, it moves the whole of comparative law scholarship one step further, not only as a subject or discipline but also as a concrete methodology (instead of a method of study) and a tool for legal construction (or deconstruction). The current book is no doubt one of the first tiered comparative law books showing comparatists, scholars, and students how the subject can be further developed over the long term.

This book has tried to avoid a Western-centric approach to the subject of comparative law. The traditional way of comparing law, and legal systems more generally, is to use Western law as a benchmark. The result of this comparative law approach is obvious – non-Western law is always perceived as backward, which is also a central feature of the neo-classical model of law as command and a regulatory regime. The author attempts to move away from this model towards that of an increasingly transnational legal order. Recognizing the importance and uniqueness of non-Western countries and their legal systems enriches our understanding of law and legal orders, not only at the national but also at the global level. This awareness certainly also complicates our task of studying and comparing laws. While it is no longer a big surprise to see that Asian legal systems have codes and statutes akin to Western countries, how these Western-originated rules work in Asian societies is still a mystery, if not a disappointment. The book contains some interesting parts discussing litigation in Japan and the death penalty in Asian countries.

To Asia-based comparatists, this “outside influence” is usually an important topic, with the colonial influence on legal development being of particular historical significance. Against this backdrop, India and Vietnam are used in the book as two examples showing this colonial (or post-colonial) element in legal development. But as the author rightly points out, colonial laws have been largely superseded in most Asian countries, and the trend nowadays is to focus on the “inside influence” – i.e. the question of what driving forces in Asian countries made these countries so different from Western counterparts. Asian values and cultures, the author contends, are worth being taken into consideration. These values and cultures are not law-centric even though they advocate some common virtues shared by Western countries. Meanwhile, Asian cultures place more focus on “collective rights” instead of a Western model of human rights. This technically makes legal transplants difficult, as the cultural roots in Asian and Western societies are basically incompatible. The book sheds some light on this issue by offering some interesting materials and perspectives. The related but less explored question is how to make use of local resources such as cultural virtues in legal and societal development. Maximizing the utility of these virtues appears an optimal approach given its low switching cost. Nevertheless, this “invention of tradition” thesis has been largely overlooked, if not completely disregarded, by Asian countries largely due to the strong influence of globalization.

Asian countries also present some challenges and puzzles to legal comparatists. Law and development theory emphasizes the dominant role of law in a country’s development. This is also the basic doctrine embedded in the law and finance theory. However, the rapid economic growth of China and other countries in Asia has created a so-called “China myth”, which becomes a counterexample disproving the correlation between rule of law and economic growth. Starting from Max Weber, Western scholars have tried hard to unveil this myth and have relied on the concept of “relationship” to explain this exceptionalism. A relationship-centred social order certainly explains the popularity of relational finance and reputational sanctions. The author offers his view on this by distinguishing legal families between universalities and singularities, a distinction that legal anthropologists seemed to have abandoned quite a while ago. Following Durkheim’s idea of local discourse, human order and patterns of domination acquired a life from the people’s own land.

While the achievements of the book are clear and outstanding, refinements can be made in future editions. The implications of comparative legal research are probably an area this book can offer more on when it is updated. The author can make use of the methodologies developed in this book to answer some, if not all, of the compelling macro-level legal issues posed by contemporary politics or economics in a comparative context. Today, comparative law appears less convincing as a method of rationalizing or predicting the current evolutionary path of legal developments in globalization – in other words, it seems to have lost its purposive character. Applying newly developed quantitative methodologies to some on-the-ground issues may strengthen its positive value.

Indeed, quantitative approaches to comparative legal issues would appear to offer a particularly promising framework for a wide range of issues studied from both the positive and normative perspectives. There is clearly a need to apply abstract methodological approaches to real world institutional designs so as to either inform optimal choice or frame an institutional structure for superior governance. Economic analysis in particular, which has already prompted important discussions about the role of legal families in promoting strong capital markets and out of which the law and finance school developed, might prove a useful vehicle for comparing other aspects of legal families.

Overall, this book offers a number of important insights into some of the processes by which reasoning and intellectual discovery occur. A more structured framework may be built upon these methodological developments.