One of the main characteristics of international law is its claim to ‘universality’. International law’s body of rules and practices is generally supposed to apply to every state and individual member of the world. This chapter challenges the perception that international law cannot be viewed through comparative lenses, as well as the idea that legal comparativism is a set of methodologies to contrast only domestic and regional legal systems and concepts. The underlying argument of the chapter is that behind common rules and shared aspirations of principles, members of an international system may adopt very different approaches, doctrines and procedures of internalisation. That invites an important role for comparativism. The chapter exemplifies this broad research agenda through a panoramic analysis of international human rights law and international environmental law, in both cases looking at foreign relations law and its constituencies in different legal realities.

This essay investigates pre-battle omens and portents through three interpretative lenses: the ontological turn in anthropology, literary and historiographical criticism, and the cognitive science of religion. The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC is used as a case study because Xenophon, Ephorus of Cyme, and Callisthenes of Olynthus recorded a uniquely large number of portents. Given that Leuctra fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Greek world, the various omens and portents described by our sources are fully consistent with the normative Greek worldview that signs were sent by the gods before important events. Scholars have been much more open to accepting that, despite some literary embellishment, the Greeks recognized omens retrospectively, but prospective omens are not improbable in a culture that was continually on the lookout for god-sent signs. The likelihood of prospective omens is confirmed by a comparative study of the omens that appeared to members of the Seventh Cavalry and to their Arikara scouts before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. We must avoid projecting a post-Enlightenment understanding of reality onto other cultures, thus devaluing the human dependence on communication with supernatural powers that was so central to the experience of the ancient Greeks.

The constituent elements of the book: Hermetic spirituality, the historical imagination, alterations of consciousness, the relation between language and experiential knowledge, and radical agnosticism in the study of religion. Narrative historiography and historical-comparative methods.

National judicial systems within the European Union (EU) face pressures toward alignment under the policy agendas for judicial cooperation connected with the Lisbon Treaty and the widespread practice of ‘transnational borrowing’ among courts. Using the CJEU and ECtHR as case studies in the phenomena of judicial culture and transnational judicial communication, this chapter explores how constitutional norms and formal policies interact with contextual influences (including informal judicial interaction and evolving national ideas and practices regarding judging and judicial organisation) to produce increasing legal alignment among the member states. In doing so, the chapter explicitly highlights the need to combine comparative legal analysis with socio-legal research methods in order to understand the evolution of constitutional law.

In the past two decades comparative law scholars have rediscovered the importance of the debate on method. For a long time left in the background as a by-product of the old controversy on the epistemic status of the discipline, the ‘struggle for the methods’ has experienced a sudden revival. But does it really make sense to keep on engaging in a wearying confrontation among the various possible paradigms, once one recognizes that, as Patrick Glenn observed, ‘the history of comparative law is not one of adherence to a methodological norm but rather one of deviation and variety’? It makes sense, indeed, because ‘eclecticism’ as a theoretical perspective is itself the sign of the times and cannot strive for universal validity. Looking back at the history of comparative law, one is struck by the circumstance that throughout the formative era, the idea that obtained most credit in European intellectual circles was the opposite one, namely that ‘there is a comparative method’ (rectius: ‘Comparative Method’, as it was once written). This chapter is aimed at bringing back to light some distinctive traits of the original discourse on the ‘comparative method’ and highlighting the importance of the ‘scientific paradigm’ for the acceptance of comparative law as an autonomous subject of legal research.

With some fundamental changes taking place in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in an increasingly globalized world, especially the rapid growth of Asian economy and the rise of China, many of the old paradigms originated in the nineteenth century in social sciences and the humanities are losing their explanatory power and need to be modified and updated. Global history, for example, puts emphasis on the connectedness of the world from a broader perspective than the nineteenth-century norm of national histories, and world literature examines literary and cultural traditions far beyond the Eurocentric concentration and the Western canon. East Asia with its traditional Sinosphere and the Chinese scriptworld are getting more attention in recent scholarship as a regional cultural concept, which may offer some constructive ideas and insights into the multiplicity of cultural centers rather than the monolithic nucleus of a national model. This essay will discuss East Asia as a potential paradigm for the comparative study of literatures and cultures not just in East Asia, but for the idea of world literature as well.