Global Legal History: A Comparative Law Perspective

This collection brings together a group of international legal historians to further scholarship in different areas of comparative and regional legal history. Authors are drawn from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to produce new insights into the relationship between law and society across time and space. The book is divided into three parts: legal history and legal culture across borders, constitutional experiences in global perspective, and the history of judicial experiences. The three themes, and the chapters corresponding to each, provide a balance between public law and private law topics, and reflect a variety of methodologies, both empirical and theoretical. The volume highlights the gains that may be made by comparing the development of law in different countries and different time periods.

The book will be of interest to an international readership in Legal History, Comparative Law, Law and Society, and History.

List of figures

List of tables

List of contributors

Global comparative legal history: an introduction

Joshua C. Tate, Jose Reinaldo de Lima Lopes, and Andres Botero-Bernal

Part I

Legal history and legal culture across borders

1 Sincerity Based Proper Relationship: Socrates and Confucius

Chi-Shing Chen

2 Legal Development from a Comparative Perspective: English contract law in the nineteenth century

Catharine MacMillan

3 Legal history and comparative perspective: a study of the Cuban experience

Fabricio Mulet Martinez

4 Bar associations and the circulation of legal knowledge: Argentina and Brazil, 1917-1943

Mariana de Moraes Silveira

Part II

Constitutional experiences in global perspective

5 Lessons from the History of Courts on the Review of Constitutional Amendments in Colombia

Mario Alberto Cajas-Sarria

6 The Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 in Mexico: From Individual Guarantees to Social Rights, 1917-1928

Humberto Morales Moreno

7 Presidential Impeachments in Brazil: Lessons from the Past and Challenges for the Future

Rafael Mafei Rabelo Queiroz

Part III

History of judicial experiences

8 Exclusion and Inclusion of the French Law on Neighboring Plots of Land in the Civil Codes of Francophone Switzerland, Louisiana, and Quebec: Reflections on the Relation between Law and Society

Asya Ostroukh

9 A Legal-Historical Chronicle of Rule-of-Law Narratives in Hong Kong

Andra le Roux-Kemp

10 Justice in the Ibero-American World in the Enlightenment Era

Andrea Slemian

11 Family Courts and Violence against Women in Guatemala, 1964-1996

John W. Wertheimer

Index