Comparative Law and Economics. Borrowing and Resistance

Comparative law and economics is a rather new discipline located at the frontiers of contemporary legal research. This innovative scholarly paradigm - combining the analytical tools of adjoining and complementary social sciences in order to develop a critical approach to legal rules and institutions - conveys a distinctive European perspective on the theory and practice of law and economics. In the age of globalisation, the diuse and substantial lack of comparative understanding within the legal community brings about a serious challenge to the epistemological validity of the traditional economic analysis of law. Comparative law and economics treats the legal and institutional backgrounds as dynamic variables and attempts to build models which re ect the ever changing layered complexity of the real world of the law, broadening the horizon of the underlying legal discourse and conferring a higher degree of realism to the theoretical analysis. The false opposition between a global dimension, which is the domain of the market and of ecient institutions, and a local dimension, as the location of solidarity and politics, requires a genuine cosmopolitan legal culture to be exposed and challenged. In other words, what is currently required is a global jurist capable to handle analogies and dierences, to locate them at the proper level of the institutional scenario, to register the dierent sensitivities and stakes that are at play in the centre and in the periphery; a global jurist capable, in one sentence, to deconstruct the objectivity of market globalisation worldwide.