This essay argues for a practice of comparative legal scholarship emerging from the insight of legal pluralists. If everyday life is a normative order (or a constellation of normative orders), it can be compared to other, less transient normative orders. Continuity, discontinuity, shared and divergent characteristics can then be identified. The language and features of one can be used to understand the other. Through cultural translation, “microlegal” and macrolegal systems can become the object of studies in comparative law. The argument proceeds in three steps. In the first part, drawing from the work of Michael Reisman, the conceptual apparatus of official law is enlisted to present the mundane encounter as a space of interaction subject to “legal” ordering. The second part begins from the other end — it points to the uses of everyday life as allegory for fundamental problems of macrolegal ordering, as illustrated in the work of Roderick Macdonald. In the final part, the two strands are brought together in a comparison of the features of microlegal encounters, on the one hand, and large scale contractual relationships described by Jean-Guy Belley, on the other hand. Architectural continuity is manifested in the fact that similar tensions or polarities are part of the structure of normative orders at each layer, from the brief encounter to the formal, institutionalized, and large-scale examples of human interaction.