A Modern Approach to Comparing Legal Cultures (A Book Review of Stefan Goltzberg’s “Le Droit Comparé”. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2018. 128 р.)

This review of Stefan Goltzberg’s “Le Droit comparé” (2018) focuses on the problems of the admissibility of comparing normative systems that have endured much criticism due to their formal and/or substantive features, as well as the criteria for comparing legal cultures. According to S. Goltzberg, objective analysis presupposes reasonable restraint of the comparativist, which brings comparative jurisprudence closer to comparative linguistics. In addition, it is necessary to take into account the context in which legal phenomena arise and develop. S. Goltzberg classified the main directions of comparative law into two groups. The first group includes functionalism and economic analysis of law. Their proponents compare models for solving actual problems and use the presumption of similarity of the compared objects. The second group includes culturalism and the school of critical legal studies. Their followers adhere to the presumption of differences and question many classical concepts, constructions, and dichotomies of dogmatic jurisprudence. The key concept for S. Goltzberg’s approach to comparing legal cultures is the source of law, which he considers in connection with legal argumentation and theory of literary genres. Evaluating the arguments of supporters and opponents of legal borrowing, he develops an approach to comparing legal phenomena, which allows for the possibility of legal transplants, but at the same time takes into account the modification of the object of transplantation in a new culture.