»Comparative Law andMulticultural Legal Classes:
Challenge or Opportunity?«
Droit comparé:
aide ou défi dans les cours de droit multiculturelles?
To Professors
Hitoshi Aoki (Japan)
Melina Fachin (Brazil)
Silvia Ferreri (Italy)
Shu-Chin Grace Kuo (Taiwan)
Myriam Hunter-Henin (Britain)
Arif A. Jamal (Singapore)
Jan Kuklík (Czech Republic)
Alexandra Mercescu (Romania)
Elina N. Moustaira (Greece)
Agapiou Nevi (Cyprus)
René Pahud de Mortanges (Switzerland)
Agustín Parise (Argentina)
Haluk Songur (Turkey)
Jan Thiessen (Germany)
Wibo van Rossum (Netherlands)
The next World Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law will be held at Fukuoka in 2018, with »Comparative Law and Multicultural Legal Classes: Challenge or Opportunity?« as one of its topics.
Being not the originator but the one assigned as the general reporter of this very topic, unfortunately in the meantime I was unexpectedly hospitalised so I was unable to prepare a conception on the topic and a number of questions to be preferably responded to by the incoming national reports.
Obviously, the topic comes from the professional experience of all ours, more and more common in today’s world, having “multicultural legal classes” which themselves represent those various legal traditions, priorities, sensitivities, conceptualisations and options, taught by all us under the aegis of “comparative law”. All this is to mean that, perhaps, each by each and mutually, the internalised ideal of what is understood as order by our audience and students may get confronted, from external fora, with others’ differing internalisation, that is, perhaps of ours as their teachers and professors, in the same class. As a challenge calling for answer or offering an opportunity to have a further search for possible common foundation, it is a new situation as compared to the past’s homogeneous (or by far more homogeneous) auditoria. That is, the progressive internationalisation of law teaching worldwide has produced multiculturalism in the womb of the institutional education’s learning process itself, generating new questions, involving new sensitivities, and time and again, the need for reconsidering and, at times, even re-substantiating the foundations of the set of conceptualisation made hitherto in our discipline “the comparative law”, especially in various classifications (groupings and particularly dichotomisations) and in the grounding and explanation thereof.
In principle, as a scholarly topic to be debated within an International Academy of Comparative Law World Congress, the topic’s basics do not differ from the practical cultivation of the scholarly field called “comparative law” and especially “comparative legal cultures”. Any of its partial themes and problem areas, approached and elaborated/monographed by anyone as offered to the judgment of the world community of scholars, made up of “multicultural comparative law classes of professionals” themselves, has the same perspective, which can also be taken either as challenge or opportunity.
In any case, the topic to be debated in the World Congress has a double facet.
On the one hand, it calls to reconsidering the ontological and epistemological claims—ideals and reality—of/behind“comparative law” in general and “comparative legal cultures” in particular. In which sense and how much can they be truly objective? and purely descriptive? Is there evaluation involved in from the very beginning? and on behalf of and representing the underlying culture of whom? For, e.g., ‘development’, ‘progress’, ‘more accomplishment, refinement, or elaboration (etc.) in the output’ amongst many key terms—in which sense? and from what a perspective, and whose perspective? Or, is law as such an embodiment of an ideal of order, autochthonous in all its variations, that withstands anyreductive view and excludes any proper comparisonwhich would then project and explain it as the particular of something general?Or, on the final analysis, what is this general if at all? that is, what is the basis of any comparison? Advancing, for instance,as in most of the cases is done, the own arrangement as tertium comparationis, only in order to arrive at its deeper understanding through reflecting it in comparison with others’ arrangements?
On the other hand, teaching is characteristically a small community interactive process with a relatively huge past of the accumulation of practical experience therein. I hope that the total sum of thematic reports—for the time being expected from Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Romania, Singapore, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey[1]—will act as a think-tank on cases, either problematic or ones advancing the mutual learning process, that may contribute to both highlighting and debating the topic.
As to the comparative law teaching side of the complex issue outlined above, the originator (anonymous) proposal[2] was meant to face the difficulty in teaching to diverse classes, when mere classification, inclusion/exclusion, dichotomisation, or grouping may make students offended or shocked, mostly because of the pure fact of their rather distinct self-perception of differences/oppositions. As noticed in its outlining explanation, it may cover issues of what are truly religious laws, as well as Islamic law(s), spanning to the intimate relationship among the laws of China, Japan, and Korea. Simultaneously, however, owing to the students’ heterogeneity in cultural background, such classes can easily foster new incentives to learn. At the same time, they raise open questions calling for answer as well: how to involve actively students as witnesses of what are actually taught to them? How to optimise the opportunity of having students from different backgrounds to make teaching more alive and involving? Is it efficient to ask someone, for instance, to take the floor in class and speak about the specific institution of his/her homeland as an example of a particular legal approach or technique within a given classification? What about having students interview their classmates and work together to prepare a presentation to the rest of the students? And lastly, if not finally, are there strategies advisable by teachers with relevant practice to suggest anything to the rest of comparatists?
The topic is quite complex in addressing concurrentlycomparative law as an academic subject and comparative law as a teaching subject with specific methods and techniques, that is, theoretical issues and mere pragmatism.
All in all, both elucidation of ontological and epistemological background claims and highlighting relevant teaching practice need solid foundation, possibly and preferably within the frame of a hoped-for anthropology of order and ordering.
Accordingly, responses to either side or, if possible, both sides of the above complex are welcome, elaborated both in theoretical substantiation and the summary with conclusions of practical teaching experience, shortly exemplified.
*
In terms of the Guidelines issued by the International Academy of Comparative Law,[3] specific thematic reports in English or French are expected as developed into a full paper/chapter format, suitable to be included—after editorial selective assessment—in a thematic collection. The General Reports as well as collections of thematic reports are all published in the International Academy of Comparative Law Series »Ius Comparatum – Global Studies in Comparative Law« by Springer Publishing.[4] For a separate thematic volume—including the General Report as well as the questionnaire used by the General Reporter—a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 20 special reports on the topic are needed, all in all amounting to a minimum 110.000 words (equating to around 200 typeset pages) and a maximum of 220.000 words (equating to around 400 typeset pages) under average conditions. According to the same Guidelines, “each contributor will receive a personal copy of the book plus permanent electronic access.”
In terms of a personal message by the IACL Secretary-General,[5] the deadline to send in my General Report being set as April 30, 2018, the deadline to send the National/Specific Reports to me as the General Reporter should be set by December 31, 2017.
Hoping successful common work,
I remain
Yours very sincerely,
(Csaba Varga)
General Reporter
Prof Em / Institute for Legal Philosophy of the Catholic University of Hungary
H–1428 Budapest 8, POBox 6 (for parcel, H–1082 Budapest, Szentkiralyi ut 28)
Research Prof Em / Institute for Legal Studies
of the Social Science Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
(private) +361-394-1161
[1]A final list collected by the International Academy of Comparative Law on 1 August, 2016, that can in principle be complemented by the General Reporter for countries not represented hitherto.
[2] March 15, 2016, 7:03 from the International Academy of Comparative Law Secretary-General Diego P. Fernández Arroyo, <>.
[3]Issued on the August 1, 2016.
[4] For its website, cf.
[5] September 26, 2016, 12:24 by Professor Diego P. Fernández Arroyo.