What Does Globalisation Mean for the Comparative Study of Law?

Comparative law has grown enormously in recent years. Living in a more complex, more interconnected world has produced an expansion rather than a contraction of the subject. This has raised new challenges, and opened up new horizons for our subject. It has also helped to bring into the arena of comparative law new practitioners of the art from various parts of the world. New perspectives on the vocation of comparative law as a means to know how the law unfolds in various places have emerged. The once prevailing, nearly exclusive attention to the national dimensions of the law is a thing of the past. A strong awareness has matured about what lies beyond the State and how to work on these dimensions of the law. Comparative law thus plays a major role in clarifying how various legal regimes, deriving from diverse origins, interact at the world and at the regional, national and sub national level, as well as structures of various transnational communities.