"Historical Comparative Law and Comparative Legal History Legal history and comparative law overlap in important respects. This is more apparent with the use of some methods for comparison, such as legal transplant, natural law, or nation building. M.N.S. Sellers nicely portrayed the relationship. The past is a foreign country, its people strangers and its laws obscure.... No one can really understand her or his own legal system without leaving it first, and looking back from the outside. The comparative study of law makes one's own legal system more comprehensible, by revealing its idiosyncrasies. Legal history is comparative law without travel. Legal historians, perhaps especially in the United States, have been skeptical about the possibility of a fruitful comparative legal history, preferring in general to investigate the distinctiveness of their national experience. Comparatists, however, content with revealing or promoting similarities or differences between legal systems, by their nature strive toward comparison. Some American historians, especially since World War II, see the value in this"--

Radin, Max. Law as Logic and Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940. ix, [1], 171 pp. Reprinted 2000 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd. LCCN 99-30670. ISBN 1-58477-008-2. Cloth. $55. * "Although this volume does not purport to be a serious contribution to legal science or to legal philosophy, it is full of the mellow wisdom, the gracious erudition, the provoking phrase, and the human sympathy that make almost anything that Max Radin says or writes worth pondering. It presents a series of lectures on two texts: the dictum of Coke, J. 'Reason is the life of the law,' and the dissenting opinion of Holmes, J., 'The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.'" Felix S. Cohen, Harvard Law Review 54:711. Marke, A Catalogue of the Law Collection of New York University (1953) 924.