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The following is an edited transcript of the closing plenary session of the XVIIIth International Congress of Comparative Law. The session took place on Saturday, July 31, 2010, in Washington, D.C., at the conclusion of the week-long congress, which is held quadrennially by the International Academy of Comparative Law (Académie Internationale de Droit Comparé). The remarks were given in a mix of French and English, but for ease of reading the transcript below is almost entirely in English.
DAVID V. SNYDER: Bonjour. Good morning. I would like to start us thinking about the problems and prospects of comparative law.
At this point in the conference, at the end, it seems to me we should focus on two topics. First, we need to identify and consider the most challenging problems in comparative law. To articulate the issues often leads a long way toward a solution. Second, we should look to the future of the discipline, perhaps (but not necessarily) in light of those problems.
Over the years, and particularly in the last decade, comparative law has been criticized for excessive doctrinalism, shuttered attitudes to interdisciplinary inquiry, timidity in approaching broad-gauge study, as well as tendencies to superficiality, triviality, obscurantism, and exoticization-not to mention claims of ultimate irrelevance.
These sorts of problems have paralyzed me sometimes. It will not come as a surprise to you that I have written a certain amount in comparative law.7 But it may come as a surprise to you that I have never taught and have no plans to teach comparative law. I do not know how to do it.
I should perhaps say I have taught no course that has "comparative law" in the title. I do teach international sales, and in that course I cannot help but be a comparatist. From the standpoint of transactional lawyers, there are many legal choices to be made in engineering a transaction and in choosing the legal regime that will govern it. To be more concrete: an international sale will require some source of law. The sale might be governed by international law,8 or it might be governed, if the parties choose, by some domestic law. The parties often have the power to choose. The lawyer, then, must consider the different rules...