LE ORIGINI DEL DIRITTO COMPARATO E I SUOI MAESTRI. UNA QUESTIONE DI METODO

Comparative Law as a discipline began to consolidate in the late Nineteenth century, essentially by French and German scholars. In On the Shoulders of Giants? The Methodological Question of Comparative Law and its Narrative, Tommaso Amico di Meane traces the evolutionary stages of this discipline, from 1850 to 2000, with particular attention to the debate on method and its places of “incubation”: academic journals, associations, chairs, and institutes of Comparative Law. What emerges is a portrait of a community of scholars that immediately focused on method as a means of asserting its emancipation from the other legal sciences, inevitably also making it the ground for confrontation (and clash) between different generations of comparatists. The search for methodological identity is a constant in Comparative Law, whose methods are closely linked to the historical, political and social context in which they are shaped.