The trend of measuring performances is global and pervasive. We all live in quantified societies, in which performances in an ever-growing array of fields–from education to health, work to credit, justice to consumption–are assessed and governed through quantitative techniques. While the disruption brought by the quantitative turn has been widely studied by social scientists, legal research on the issue is minimal. This book aims to fill the gap. The essays herein collected explore how performance measurements interact with the law in different regions and sectors, which legal effects they produce, and for whose benefit.

Reconstructs existing comparative law scholarship into a coherent analytic framework so as to both fend off current charges of theoretical arbitrariness and guide future work.

The most up-to-date and contextualised offering for comparative law students and scholars, referencing the newest research in the field.

The book delves into the 'deeper structures' of the world's legal systems, where law meets culture, politics and socio-economic factors.

This fully revised and updated second edition of The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law provides a wide-ranging and diverse critical survey of comparative law at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It summarizes and evaluates a discipline that is time-honoured but not easily understood in all its dimensions. In the current era of globalization, this discipline is more relevant than ever, both on the academic and on the practical level. The Handbook is divided into three main sections. Section I surveys how comparative law has developed and where it stands today in various parts of the world. This includes not only traditional model jurisdictions, such as France, Germany, and the United States, but also other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. Section II then discusses the major approaches to comparative law - its methods, goals, and its relationship with other fields, such as legal history, economics, and linguistics. Finally, section III deals with the status of comparative studies in over a dozen subject matter areas, including the major categories of private, economic, public, and criminal law. The Handbook contains forty-eight chapters written by experts from around the world. The aim of each chapter is to provide an accessible, original, and critical account of the current state of comparative law in its respective area which will help to shape the agenda in the years to come. Each chapter also includes a short bibliography referencing the definitive works in the field.

Now in its second edition, this textbook presents a critical rethinking of the study of comparative law and legal theory in a globalising world, and proposes an alternative model. It highlights the inadequacies of current Western theoretical approaches in comparative law, international law, legal theory and jurisprudence, especially for studying Asian and African laws, arguing that they are too parochial and eurocentric to meet global challenges. Menski argues for combining modern natural law theories with positivist and socio-legal traditions, building an interactive, triangular concept of legal pluralism. Advocated as the fourth major approach to legal theory, this model is applied in analysing the historical and conceptual development of Hindu law, Muslim law, African laws and Chinese law.

A critical manifesto making the case for a radically alternative approach to the theory and practice of comparative law.