Foreign Law, the Comparatist, and Culture: How It Is

The field of comparative law has emphatically prioritized a positivist conception of law. Problematically, such apprehension must structurally fail to yield the interpretive information regarding foreign law that can possibly generate meaningful understanding of foreignness. Indeed, positivism entails significant re-presentative distortion and a correlative loss of intellectual credit. This essay urges acknowledgement of such serious epistemic deficit, of its detrimental impact on comparative law, and of the need to restore intellectual cogency to comparative research through a radically different approach recognizing the fact that foreign law necessarily exists as culture and that the comparatist interpreting foreignness inevitably exists as cultural being.