Comparative Contexts in Legal History: are we all comparatists now?

Abstract

The article discusses Comparative Legal History from a methodological point of view, seeking to define comparison departing from historiography and demonstrating how the discipline of legal history emerged in the nineteenth century to validate the idea of a national legal science. Secondly, the article presents the traditional idea of comparison as a means of constructing new identities. Finally, it introduces a new method of Comparative Legal History, claiming that the research object can always be located in a wider perspective than the national one. This demonstrates that comparison could be understood as an innate instrument of the legal historian.