Chapter 1 introduces students to the various approaches used to pursue comparative legal studies. It especially presents the orthodox “legal families“ approach to macro-comparative law. The chapter then considers several critiques of that tradition. H. Patrick Glenn challenges the concept of “legal families“ and suggests a “legal traditions” framework to replace it. The chapter then presents the social-contextual approach to comparative law as promoted by Legrand. Finally, the chapter urges students to recognize the ethical implications of comparative law through Frankenberg’s concepts of “distancing” and “differencing.”

Engaging with Indigenous legal traditions brings to light the existence of different forms of legal conscience. The Indigenous legal traditions catalyse both the ontological questioning and its response. And they also offer a response to the critique of law and the evolution of legal practice. Approaching different legal traditions requires, however, a change of perspective. This reflection considers the insights of anthropology, linguistics, literature, translation and semiotics as applied to law. Towards a ‘shared framework’ and ‘common legal sense’, the semiotic approach enables us to visualise the legal landscape, beyond the borders of modern constituted forms, on a wider horizon of legal communication. It allows us to approach the narrative semiotics of different legal traditions, such as the dances, storytelling, artefacts like Wampum belts and protocols for ceremonies in Indigenous law. Furthermore, reconnecting legal traditions contributes to recalling, re-embodying and reconnecting the legal subject with the more-than-human realm – reconstituting the legal experience in its integrity. Beyond the operation of translation, what is at stake in the evolution of the legal language and practice is the constitution of a common semiotic space, a space of legal communication and understanding.

H. Patrick Glenn, Professor of Law and former Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at McGill University, passed away in 2014. For the past decades, he had been a central figure of legal scholarship, especially in the global discourse on comparative law. This chapter is the introduction to a collection that intends to honour Professor Glenn’s intellectual legacy by engaging critically with his ideas, especially focusing on his visions of a ‘cosmopolitan state’ and of law conceptualized as ‘tradition’. To this end, the collection brings together an international group of leading scholars in comparative law, legal philosophy, legal sociology, and legal history. This introductory chapter situates Glenn’s work within the context of his trajectory as a scholar of comparative law and reflects critically, in particular, on Glenn’s concept of ‘tradition’.

H. Patrick Glenn’s works are the result of a profound reflection on the epistemological conditions of comparative law in our epoch. He recognized that, since the emergence of the modern state, legal theory focused nearly exclusively on the state as a source of law. His approach to the study of comparative law expressed the conviction that a historical shift in emphasis in the conceptualization of Western law was long overdue. Accordingly, he considered how states and state law exist in a larger context, where alternative forms of normativity are working. This reflection brought about the open recognition of a wider range of sources of law and a wider range of relations between laws and between peoples, which explains why much of his work is to be inscribed in the paradigm of legal pluralism. His work goes beyond that paradigm, however, by exploring what pluralism entails both at the national and at the transnational level for comparative law studies, and for their methodological orientation. This chapter pays tribute to his vision and his scholarship by exploring how comparative law can fruitfully engage with legal anthropology, legal linguistics, and translation studies, as well as with the dynamics of transnational and global law.

This chapter introduces a basic theoretical conception of law as an obliging force, which binds us together in governing communities, thereby enabling property of various types to exist. The chapter also sketches a stylized historical narrative, drawn from Max Weber's developmental sociology of law, about how intellectual property emerged, as a new type of legal property. The stylized narrative envisions three basic "layers" to the modern institution of intellectual property, which roughly correspond to three different paradigms for the obliging force of law: empirical formality, semantic formality, and substantive rationality. The historical development and weaving together of these three "layers" in the obliging force of law thus becomes an overarching narrative (or meta-narrative) for the book.