History, Liberty and Comparative Law

The past is a foreign country, its people strangers and its laws obscure. Like other foreign places, this alien world has much to teach lawyers about how things might have been and are, in our own world and legal institutions. 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. Historical comparisons give lawyers and legislators the distance that they need to reform and to understand the law, without the distortions of contemporary partisan conflicts, which sometimes trouble other students of comparative law.