Comparative Law

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Offering case studies from different regions (and time periods), the four papers in this panel facilitate a comparative perspective on a question of great salience in our era of “globalization”—namely, how groups of various kinds (ethnic, religious, or otherwise) wield political authority outside the bounds of the nation-state and the role that the law plays in enabling (and hindering) their ability to do so.  Professors Riles, Knopf and Michaels examine how the technicalities of private international law (conflicts) can be deployed to enable an accommodation between potentially conflicting feminist and multicultural concerns.  Professor Stone considers how the Jewish legal experience challenges classical normative theories of the relationship of nation to law, which conceive of the state as central to law-formation.  Professor Paz studies the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transnational, Jewish ethnic-religious network, in order to shed light on the surprisingly formative role that networks played in the development of our modern, state-based legal and political system.  And Professor Turner explores the increasing transfer of criminal law competences to the EU/supranational level, examining whether this process—which generates significant national and civil society resistance—presupposes or contributes to a common EU political identity.